Open Philanthropy is looking for an Program Operations Assistant to help support our Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW) cause prioritization team. Time is the most obvious bottleneck for our staff, and we think the right person in this role could reduce this bottleneck and significantly increase the team’s effectiveness.
About the Global Health & Wellbeing team
The ten-person Global Health & Wellbeing cause prioritization team investigates potential new cause areas, prioritizes across causes, and recommends new grants. Much of the team’s work focuses on policy, scientific research, and global development work aimed at improving lives as much as possible by reducing premature deaths and increasing incomes, particularly for the world’s poorest people. Open Philanthropy’s initial cause areas were the result of extensive research, weighing different evidence to arrive at the areas where we believed we could have the greatest impact per dollar spent. Our current round of expansion will take a similarly open-minded and quantitative approach while incorporating lessons learned from our first causes.
Earlier this year, we announced hires to lead grantmaking in global aid advocacy, South Asian air quality and supporting the effective altruism community around Global Health and Wellbeing, three new cause areas we added as a result of the team’s research. We are continuing to work to identify new giving areas that can beat our ambitious 1,000x social ROI bar. Over the coming years, the team will directly (through grantmaking) and indirectly (through hiring new program officers) decide how to distribute billions in new giving.
About the role
You would report to Business Operations Lead Maura Taylor, and work to provide time-saving support to key leaders on the GHW Cause Prioritization team. This will entail both directly supporting team principals (including Chief of Staff Zach Robinson and Senior Program Officers Emily Oehlsen and Otis Reid), as well as creating structures and infrastructure to make the team’s work more efficient overall. Your core responsibilities would include:
- Performing ongoing administrative and logistical tasks, such as scheduling meetings, submitting expense reports, and booking travel.
- Helping manage a large volume of inbound emails from grantees and other external parties. As you gain context on the team’s work, you will increasingly use your own judgment to prioritize and respond to messages on behalf of others.
- Managing and organizing team documents, and identifying better systems for tracking and sharing team outputs over time.
- Doing ad hoc research or organizational tasks (e.g. proofreading documents, downloading and organizing data in a spreadsheet, etc.).
- Supporting the logistics and operations side of team projects (e.g. the Regranting Competition and Cause Exploration Prizes).
- Taking notes at team meetings.
- Handling confidential and potentially sensitive information carefully and professionally.
- Supporting other organizational functions/staff members as needed. In general, it’s hard to predict everything you might be asked to tackle in this role — we’re a rapidly growing organization, and expect all staff to be flexible about what they work on and put contributing to our mission first.
Ideally, a hire would quickly master the responsibilities above and then (as they became more familiar with the team’s work) move towards proactively identifying key administrative bottlenecks and coming up with solutions for them (e.g. proposing a change to the team’s scheduling software, or automating a piece of repetitive work).
Over time, a strong performer could move into a generalist or specialist role on our operations team, or grow into a more broadly scoped role supporting the GHW Cause Prioritization team with operationally demanding projects.
Who might be a good fit
You might be a great fit for this work if you:
- Work in a way that is consistent with our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration and inclusiveness.
- Are detail-oriented, organized, and conscientious. You feel confident in your ability to keep on top of a large number of open items and next steps while making sure nothing gets dropped.
- Are service-minded and comfortable with some amount of repetition in your work; you are motivated by the idea of doing whatever will have the most impact, even when it’s not glamorous.
- Are a strong communicator in person and in writing. You convey information, and decision processes effectively, and tend towards an information-dense, transparent communication style.
- Are eager to learn and not afraid to ask questions to check your understanding.
- Are interested in the GHW Cause Prioritization team’s work, and excited to contribute to it
Above all, we are looking for people motivated to contribute to our mission of helping others as much as we can with the resources available to us. Whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this role would make you excited to come to work every day.
Other details
- This is a full-time, permanent position. You are welcome to work from our offices in the Bay Area or from a remote location. We are happy to consider applicants based outside the U.S. but you must be able to work within U.S. working hours. You would support team members in multiple locations (currently based in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Chicago).
- Unfortunately, we are not able to sponsor visas for this role.
- The baseline compensation for this role is $84,303.19, which includes a base salary of $73,307.12 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of 15% of your base pay up to $20,000, which in this case would be $10,996.07.
- This compensation assumes a remote work location; there will be upwards adjustments for candidates based in Washington D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area.
- We offer a comprehensive benefits package, including full health, dental, vision and life insurance, flexible work hours and location, and a stipend for ergonomic equipment.
- We would ideally like a candidate to begin as soon as possible after receiving an offer (likely in November), but we are willing to wait if the best candidate can only start later.
We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.
If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@openphilanthropy.org.