About the team

Open Phil’s Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) Capacity Building team[1] works to increase the amount of attention and resources put towards problems that threaten to eliminate or drastically worsen the future of sentient life, such as the possibility of an existential catastrophe this century. Open Phil’s other GCR focus areas aim to make direct progress on those problems. We share these goals, but don’t work on them directly: instead, we focus on ensuring these problems get the resources they need.

We think that one of the most important constraints on addressing these problems is the limited set of people who have the motivation, context, and skills necessary to contribute, relative to what is available in more mature fields. We want to subsidize and nurture the growth of nascent fields — particularly AI safety, because of our concern that transformative AI might be developed in a small number of years or decades. Consequently, many of the projects our team supports aim to communicate important ideas about existential risks, and to equip people to contribute to reducing those risks by connecting them with opportunities to acquire skills, professional relationships, and strategically useful information.

In 2022, we directed over $100 million across hundreds of grants — more than double the previous year’s funding. We make a wide range of grants, from larger grants to established projects like 80,000 Hours, LessWrong/Lightcone Infrastructure, and the Centre for Effective Altruism to hundreds of smaller grants to support individual career transitions; a few recent examples include student groups focused on technical alignment research at Harvard and MIT, online courses in AI safety and biosecurity accelerating hundreds of participants at various stages of their careers, and scholarship programs aimed at supporting careers in reducing global catastrophic risks.

About the role

Program Associates help drive the program’s goals forwards, often by investigating funding opportunities and developing ideas that lead to grants. After their first year, people in this role can expect to become significantly responsible for grants totalling >$10M per year (or more, for Senior Program Associates), or for non-grantmaking projects (such as research and evaluation work) that seem to us to have similar expected value.

In this role, you might:

• Investigate grant opportunities. Essentially, these are focused, practical research projects aimed at answering the question “should Open Philanthropy fund this person or project, or not (and if so, at what level, for what length of time, etc.)?” You’ll work to evaluate opportunities we encounter and to identify new opportunities, and then to analyze how well these advance our priorities and what other effects they might have on the talent pipelines we are trying to support. You may be in charge of following up on the progress of these grantees. 

• Design, implement, and advertise new grantmaking initiatives that involve making funding available for a particular class of activity (e.g. our scholarship for international undergraduates and our course development grants program). These are programs designed to support large clusters of high-priority grants with structural similarities, so increase the number of such grants we make (e.g. by making it apparent that we are keen to support such work) and increase the efficiency with which we make them (e.g. by having a formula for determining the size of a potential travel stipend, so that it doesn’t need to be considered anew each time). 

• Build and maintain relationships in the field, and facilitate the exchange of feedback between us and our grantees and other stakeholders. 

• Do research to inform program strategy, and help evaluate existing grantmaking initiatives, e.g. by assessing cost-effectiveness. 

• Conduct and communicate research on the key bottlenecks and gaps in the existing existential risk talent pipelines, both internally within the team and externally with other stakeholders. “Pitch” potential candidates for founding new priority projects, via explaining the reasons why we believe them to be high priority and a good fit for the candidate in question.

Who might be a good fit

You might be a particularly good fit for this role if you:

• Share our goals related to reducing existential risk, and are excited about helping other people pursue those goals. You’re interested in our basic premise that capacity-building work can lead more people with diverse and useful skillsets to pursue high-priority work that reduces existential risk. 

• Have strong analytical and critical thinking skills, especially the ability to quickly grasp complex issues, find the best arguments for and against a proposition, and skeptically evaluate claims. You should feel comfortable thinking in terms of expected value and reasoning quantitatively and probabilistically about tradeoffs and evidence.

• Are interested in getting to know different people and projects, and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, like an investor would.

• Are resourceful and creative, and enjoy thinking about unorthodox ways to build strong fields and communities.

• Are optimization-focused; you constantly seek out improvements and question the status quo in pursuit of better solutions or systems. For more senior versions of the role, you are inclined to take full responsibility and ownership over the outcome of a task, including poorly-scoped tasks that require first-principles thinking.

• Communicate in a clear, information-dense and calibrated way, with good reasoning transparency, both in writing and in person. You should be willing to ask questions if you are confused and push back on conclusions you disagree with or don’t understand.

• For more junior versions of the role, 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.

Other details

• Location: We strongly prefer hires to be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, but may be willing to consider exceptional candidates in other places. 

  • We’ll support candidates with the costs of relocation to the Bay.

  • We’ll also consider sponsoring U.S. work authorization for international candidates (though we don’t control who is and isn’t eligible for a visa and can’t guarantee visa approval). 

• Compensation: The starting compensation for this role will be based on a range of $124,204.33 to $154,091.51 per year, which would include a base salary of $108,003.76 to $134,091.51 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $16,200.56 to $20,000.00. 

  • These compensation figures assume you’d be working from the San Francisco Bay Area; there would be cost-of-living adjustments downward for other locations. 

• Start date: The start date is flexible, and we may be willing to wait for an extended period of time for the best candidate, though we’d prefer someone to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.