We are also hiring researchers — find out more here.
We are having a webinar on these roles on March 29th, 2022. Find out more here.
Summary
TLDR: Rethink Priorities is hiring for lots of operations positions. Apply here. You can apply for as many of these roles (and our research roles) as you’d like to!
Rethink Priorities (RP) is growing rapidly. Since the beginning of 2021, we’ve expanded from around 15 staff to around 40. By the end of 2022, we will likely have over 60 staff, and plan to continue growing in 2023. We’re also now adding new programs beyond research, including a new longtermist megaproject incubation initiative. We expect that these projects will rapidly scale, and getting operational support in place for them early will be critical for their success.
Our operations have become increasingly complex during this growth, but nonetheless we’ve had a high degree of operational success:
- Despite operating in several countries, conducting research in several cause areas, and growing rapidly over the last year, we’ve experienced extremely low turnover and no major operational issues.
- RP staff consistently rate RP extremely highly on measures like psychological safety, as well as questions like “RP is a good place to work.” For the latter question, we’ve never had an internal survey where a staff member hasn’t answered 5/5 on a Likert scale (answering anonymously).
- RP research staff consistently report that the administrative burden of working at RP is minimal. For many staff, it is well below 1% of their total time.
These are great results from the perspective of our Ops team, but as we grow, they become harder and harder to maintain. We’ve consistently invested heavily in ops, putting staff in place well before we need them, paying well for operations talent (we have the same salaries for ops people and researchers with identical title levels), and working to be a flexible and compassionate employer for our research team.
Core Operations
To keep up this success through our next period of growth, we’re growing our Core Operations team, which oversees the day-to-day functioning and success of Rethink Priorities. These roles are now open to applicants. We have roles at multiple seniority levels, and would be excited to see applicants with EA backgrounds joining our team.
Special Projects
The Special Projects program is a new initiative at Rethink Priorities to support activities other than direct research conducted at RP. Roles on this team would liaise between the RP Core Operations team and these special projects. We expect that most of these projects will be in the longtermism space. RP plans on fiscally sponsoring, incubating, or otherwise hosting several of these projects over the next few years.
Rethink Priorities is increasingly working on projects that require complicated operational support. RP’s Core Operations team is focused on ensuring the day-to-day functioning of the organization, but these special projects often require more value alignment and exploration of novel areas than is necessary for the Core Operations team. Many of the special projects may spin off from RP after incubation — Special Projects staff may be well-suited to join these (or perhaps even help lead them), which will help ensure the operational success of the projects after the spinoff.
RP has an especially strong operations program, and extending the support of our Ops team beyond RP’s core research program could be helpful for both:
- Aiding the success of these special projects
- Training ops staff in these areas, which those projects may hire as they grow
Although we currently expect Special Projects staff to primarily focus on operations activities, this is unlikely to solely be day-to-day operations tasks — there are many other activities we would be excited for the right candidate to engage in, such as:
- Developing budgets
- Writing business plans for entrepreneurial projects
- Fundraising
- Liaising with stakeholders
- Researching legal/operational issues
- Scouting for talent for the projects
- Helping run prizes or requests for proposals
- Grantmaking
(But it’s fine if candidates aren’t interested in most of those areas, or if they have little experience in any of them; these roles could take many forms, depending on candidates’ interests and skills.)
2022 planned special projects
- Longtermism and EA community-building megaprojects
- RP plans on exploring and incubating longtermism megaprojects over the next year, and we plan to begin work on 1-3 projects in the near future. Special Projects will directly support these megaprojects.
- Longtermism grant opportunity scouting / talent vetting
- Several RP staff and collaborators who advise grantmakers and vet grant applications are time-constrained. Special Projects will help scout for talent and grant opportunities in the longtermism space.
- Incubating and supporting other research organizations
- There are many promising research teams outside of RP that would benefit from having strong operational support. We’d like to grow our Operations team to support these research teams and prevent these teams from being distracted by having to build operational skills themselves.
- Supporting the AI Governance and Strategy (AIGS) team
- RP’s AIGS team is a new and fast growing part of our longtermism department. The team has higher operational needs than most of our other programs, due to its fast growth, its intention to run hiring rounds and temporary fellowships twice per year, and its somewhat stringent information security protocol requirements.
We expect that the number of special projects we will fiscally sponsor or incubate will grow over the next few years, so we plan on expanding this program to support those projects.
Why RP / RP Ops?
- We have a great team culture — it’s a collaborative, friendly, and close-knit group of people interested in EA.
- We have unusually low staff turnover. RP Ops has never had a staff member quit the organization.
- We are growing rapidly, and strongly emphasize professional development. We often promote internally and provide opportunities for staff to advance in the organization, regardless of whether they want to directly manage staff.
- We provide excellent compensation and benefits, and a highly flexible workplace (we are 100% remote, and staff generally choose the hours they work besides some meetings).
- We can hire for many of these roles from most countries in the world (though being able to work during at least some working hours of your teammates is helpful).
- We respect that people have lives outside their jobs, and we work hard to ensure staff have a healthy work-life balance.
Open roles
Note: Our descriptions of who would be a good fit are mostly nice-to-haves rather than requirements; we encourage you to seriously consider applying even if you don’t perfectly match our descriptions!
Applications for all of these roles are open until April 17th, 2022.
- Salary: $75,000 to $81,000 USD
- Summary: Bookkeeper and finance generalist supporting all of RP’s work
- A good fit for:
- Someone with a few years of bookkeeping experience, especially for a remote nonprofit
- Salary: $75,000 to $81,000 USD
- Summary: Recruiter focused especially on longtermism, helping us to grow our research team over the next few years
- A good fit for:
- Someone with some recruiting experience (either as a recruiter or in another role)
- Someone deeply familiar with the longtermism community (ideally you have at least some longtermism research experience)
- Someone who wants to build an incredibly strong, applicant-friendly recruiting process
- Salary: $72,000 to $76,000 USD
- Summary: Ops generalist helping staff with day-to-day tasks, organizational legal compliance, and internal and external events
- A good fit for:
- A recent grad or someone new to EA who is interested in supporting the day-to-day work of a high-impact organization
- Someone strongly interested in event planning and management
- Salary: $115,000 to $122,000 USD
- Summary: A senior staff member with a background in EA and longtermism, managing the strategy and staff of the Special Projects program
- A good fit for:
- Strategy-focused thinkers with solid experience in people management
- People interested in operations and helping incubate high-impact projects in the longtermism space
- Salary: $72,000 to $76,000 USD
- Summary: Coordinator between incubated RP projects (especially in our new Megaprojects program) and RP operations
- A good fit for:
- Early-career people interested in operations
- People with a strong understanding of longtermism
- People interested in working on megaprojects and other high-risk/high-reward charitable projects
- Salary: $72,000 to $115,000 USD, depending on experience
- Summary: A researcher focusing on organizational design and operations at RP, helping improve our entire organization, especially as the complexity of our longtermism team grows.
- A good fit for:
- Researchers interested in organizational design
- Researchers interested in seeing their research applied immediately
- People with backgrounds in experimental research
Very excited about the operations expansion of our organization! All of these roles are exciting, and I'm keen to see RP leverage our comparative advantage of "having great operations staff to support a research organization" even further, for example by helping younger and very exciting orgs with worse operations, and/or by making the prospect of longtermist entrepreneurship less daunting, particularly for future megaprojects.