New Roles in Global Health and Wellbeing (Open Philanthropy)

Cross-posting a recent announcement, which is both a job posting and an interesting update on Open Phil's work:

Open Philanthropy is expanding and we are recruiting a number of talented new hires to help us direct philanthropic funding in new-to-OP causes and to join the team that identifies new areas for grantmaking. Our Global Health and Wellbeing team – which works to improve life through causes like global development, scientific research, and farm animal welfare – is ramping up its grantmaking. The GHW team directed more than $200M in grants in 2020 and we expect that number to rise substantially in the years to come.

We’re looking for two types of roles to help us direct billions of dollars of new giving over the coming years. 

First, we’re looking for experts who will lead Open Philanthropy’s giving in new cause areas we’ve identified as potential focus areas. We’re hiring two new Program Officers, in South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. Each of these Program Officers will identify specific grants and grantees that we believe can beat our 1,000x social return on investment bar. (You can see examples of our giving in other cause areas in our grants database.) We expect these positions to be filled by grantmakers who combine deep expertise in their area, strategic vision, and a quantitative mindset. We’re looking for people who already know many potential grantee organizations and can make reasoned and balanced arguments about why their approach is likely to clear our high bar for giving. We think finding the right grantmaker is a key ingredient to our potential impact in these causes, so we may not end up going into them if we can’t find the right people.

Second, we’re looking for talented generalists to help us find the next focus areas Open Philanthropy should fund. We’re hiring Research Fellows and Strategy Fellows to join the Global Health and Wellbeing cause prioritization team and help identify future cause areas, grants, and grantmakers. Research Fellows will usually have graduate social science experience and comfort going deep on key academic papers to evaluate them and extract and synthesize the most accurate and actionable estimates. Strategy Fellows may come from a variety of backgrounds, but will combine comfort with back-of-the-envelope calculations under uncertainty with the ability to engage potential grantees or others in the field to generate new insights.

Both Research Fellows and Strategy Fellows will work on new cause investigations – our goal is to identify new cause areas that are important, neglected, and tractable. We are entering South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy based on the work done by people currently in these roles: check out an example of our work in the South Asian air quality cause report. (You can also find older examples of our cause investigation work here.) Over time, we see lots of room for both roles to develop and expand within Open Philanthropy – becoming Program Officers, managing other cause prioritization team members, doing deeper research on strategic priorities, or building new functions within the organization.

Overall, we are looking for people who are passionate about doing the most good possible in a rigorous way. If you care greatly about improving lives around the world and enjoy thinking deeply, talking to experts or practitioners, and/or synthesizing information in a transparent and actionable way, we hope you’ll apply for a job with us. Please reach out to [email protected] if you have questions about any of these positions that aren’t answered by the job description pages or our “Working at Open Philanthropy” general Q&A.