About Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a grantmaker; our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We stress openness to many possibilities and have chosen our focus areas based on importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Our current giving areas include global health and development, scientific research, South Asian air quality, farm animal welfare, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. In 2023, we recommended just under $800 million to high-impact causes, and we’ve recommended over $3 billion in grants since our formation.

About the Recruiting team

Open Phil is growing rapidly. The organization has more than doubled in size over the last two years, and the Recruiting team has been involved in each of those acquisitions, helping teams do everything from identifying their initial hiring needs to making final offers. We develop and implement the systems by which Open Phil finds and evaluates top talent, and are Open Phil’s institutional memory and point of call for all things hiring. The team currently has six members, led by Maura Taylor. We’re looking to add more members to keep up with Open Phil’s continued growth.

Recruiting at Open Phil comprises two primary workstreams — pipeline development and round management. Roughly, pipeline development is everything we do to get strong candidates to apply to Open Phil, and round management is everything we do to find and hire the strongest candidate from the applicant pool. Recruiters generally specialize in one of these two workstreams, though they may periodically pinch-hit in the other. This posting is for the round management workstream.

What you’d be doing

Open Phil’s hiring is project-driven, whether it be a full public hiring round or a smaller opportunistic evaluation process. Each hiring project is owned by a Recruiter, whose goal is to make the best hire we can while balancing other values such as candidate experience along the way. Hiring constitutes the bulk of the Recruiting portfolio, and Recruiters who focus on round management typically juggle several hiring rounds at a time. This involves:

• Project management: Designing evaluation steps, planning round timelines, guiding hiring managers through the process, coordinating stakeholders and information streams at key decision points, and tracking the overall progress of the round to make sure nothing (and no one) is falling through the cracks.

• Infrastructure: Setting up and maintaining the back-end systems for each round to manage applicant tracking, work test submissions, etc.

• Candidate evaluation: Reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, developing or advising on new work tests, and grading work tests or advising on their grading.

• Providing guidance: Advising hiring managers on key decisions, ensuring legal compliance, and upholding the overall integrity of the hiring process. 

• Relationship management: Interfacing with candidates, responding to questions and requests, soliciting stakeholder feedback, etc. 

Recruiters also maintain and improve internal hiring systems, with some portion of their time dedicated to ongoing non-hiring projects. These range from smaller ad hoc projects (such as creating a one-off report for leadership) to larger, longer-term strategic projects. Recent and current strategic projects include developing a hiring forecast, updating evaluation steps in response to LLM developments, evaluating interview templates, implementing new features in our applicant tracking system, and building new dashboards for data analysis.

That said, it’s hard to predict all aspects of the role—we’re a rapidly growing organization, and expect all staff to be flexible and prioritize contributing to our mission. Your work may also extend to pipeline development tasks, such as advertising roles, reaching out to partners for referrals, contacting leads, conducting introductory calls with prospective candidates, representing Open Philanthropy at events, etc.

For a more in-depth look at what a workday might look like on the Recruiting team, see Dee Kathuria’s entry in our “Day in the Life” series.

Who we’re looking for

You might be a great fit for this work if you:  

• Are conscientious, highly organized, and independent. You’ll obsess over maintaining a clean candidate pipeline and make sure (almost) nothing falls through the cracks. 

• Enjoy thinking about people, and figuring out what they’d be good at and where they could contribute — a task that involves making complex judgments and taking a broad view of the organization’s needs.

• Have strong interpersonal and communication skills. For many candidates, you’ll be “the face of Open Phil,” able to convey what makes the organization unique and why it’s great to work here while also maintaining our high level of desired transparency with candidates.

• Like to move fast, get things done, and prioritize aggressively; we generally treat all recruiting work as urgent by default. 

• Enjoy iterating and improving processes; you’re skilled at breaking down complex workflows and optimizing them for clarity and efficiency. 

• Are passionate about Open Phil’s mission and excited to support our work in cause areas such as AI safety and biorisk reduction. You don’t need to be a subject matter expert in any of these fields, but will need enough context to interface effectively with stakeholders and candidates within them. 

No recruiting experience is required, but we’re looking for candidates with at least a year or two of operations-relevant experience who have successfully managed fast-moving processes without dropping balls. If you don’t yet have this experience, we suggest completing the general indication of interest for operations roles instead (and if you’re interested in working on the Recruiting team specifically, noting this in your indication of interest).

We’re especially excited by candidates with existing networks and interests relevant to our talent needs (particularly within the Global Catastrophic Risk or Effective Altruism spheres).

We don’t think it's necessary to have every quality described above; there is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. If you’re on the fence about applying because you’re unsure about your qualifications, we strongly encourage you to submit your application anyway.

Role details & benefits 

• Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $112,719.22, which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $98,016.71 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $14,702.51. 

  • These compensation figures assume a remote location; we offer higher compensation for candidates located in San Francisco or Washington, D.C.

  • All compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary for internationally based hires.

• Time zones and location: You can work remotely. While we aren’t able to sponsor visas for this role, we are open to hires outside the US willing to consistently overlap with US business hours for at least 5-6 hours of the day. Our current team is dispersed from Western US through India time zones.

• Benefits: Our benefits package includes: 

  • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.

  • Dental, vision, and life insurance for you and your family

  • Four weeks of PTO recommended per year 

  • Four months of fully paid family leave

  • A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive 

  • A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered  

  • Support for remote work — we’ll cover a remote workspace outside your home if you need one, or connect you with an Open Phil coworking hub in your city

  • We can’t always provide every benefit we offer US staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country) 

• Start date: We expect to make offers by mid-October, and hope new hires can start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, though we understand that some candidates may need longer to exit existing commitments. If this timeline doesn’t work for you, please err on the side of applying anyway and let us know in your application in case we can make alternate arrangements. 

We’re accepting applications until 11:59pm PT on September 8th. Please apply as soon as you’re able.

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 [email protected].

US-based Operations staff are typically employed by Open Philanthropy Project LLC, which is not a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. As such, this role is unlikely to be eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.