People Operations Assistant

Open Philanthropy is hiring a People Operations Assistant to support across many people-related projects, ensuring that all incoming, current, and departing employees are highly engaged and have positive experiences here.

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. We’re particularly interested in high-risk, high-reward giving that may be too unconventional for other funders. 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. 

About the People Operations Team

The People Operations Team works to manage everything people-related at Open Philanthropy. The team’s core areas of work span:

• Onboarding & offboarding — as we grow our staff, we are working to streamline and improve these key processes to ensure every employee has great first and last impressions of Open Phil that reinforce our culture and values.
• Keeping the team connected while working remotely — we manage the programming at our quarterly togetherness weeks, annual team retreats, monthly all-hands meetings, and other team gatherings. We actively solicit feedback and ideas about how else we can create meaningful opportunities for staff to connect across time zones and focus areas.
• Helping Open Phil grow — we work with our internal Business Immigration team to support international team members and to ensure that employees going through visa sponsorship have as seamless an experience as possible.
• Payroll & benefits — while most of these functions are currently contracted out, our team serves as our staff’s main point of contact for questions about pay, benefits, and other organizational policies.

New hires come to Open Phil to support our mission — our goal is to make sure they stay for the mission, the culture, and because it’s just a great place to work. You’ll be a core part of making that happen by helping us manage, scale, and improve everything that entails. 

About the Role

The People Operations Assistant will work to support Open Philanthropy across many people-related projects, ensuring that all incoming, current, and departing employees are highly engaged and have positive experiences here. Your core responsibilities would include:

• Managing the onboarding process for new hires, ensuring a seamless transition from offer acceptance to their first weeks at Open Philanthropy, as well as contributing to a smooth offboarding experience when people leave the organization.
• Supporting our people-related systems and processes. This includes the systems we use to manage HR data, onboarding and offboarding, and employee engagement.
• Helping to keep the team connected while working remotely. This includes supporting the programming at our quarterly in-person togetherness weeks and annual team retreats.

That said, it’s hard to predict everything that you might be doing — 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. 

Who we’re looking for

There are no formal degree or work experience requirements for this role, and we’re open to considering both applicants brand new to operations work, as well as more experienced candidates. You might be a great fit for this work if you:

• See internal stakeholders as customers, and want to make sure they walk away feeling helped whenever they come into contact with you or your team
• Are detail-oriented; you feel confident you could, e.g., track and update employee data without making mistakes
• Are excited to contribute to impact-driven work in a supportive capacity; you know that behind-the-scenes tasks are important, even if they seem indirect or tedious at face value.
• Work in a responsive, agile way; you stay calm when conditions change and are able to improvise and pivot quickly when priorities shift.
• Understand the importance of having a strong organizational culture, care about our cause areas, such as biosecurity and reducing risks from advanced AI, and are excited to support the kind of culture we are trying to build — we prioritize supporting staff in being ambitious about our impact and living out our operating values in their day-to-day work.

We expect all our staff to: 

• Put our mission first, and act with urgency to help us realize our ambitious goals for impact.
• Work to model our operating valuesof ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness.

Role details & benefits

• Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $90,615.30, which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $78,795.91 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $11,819.39.

  • These compensation figures assume a remote location; there would be geographic adjustments upwards for candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington, D.C.
  • All compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary for internationally based team members.

• Time zones and location: You can work from anywhere. While we are not able to sponsor visas for this role, we are open to hires outside the US willing to consistently overlap with US business hours for 5-6 hours of the day.

• Benefits: Our benefits package includes

  • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
  • 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
  • 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’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer — and definitely no later than November, though ideally, much sooner.

We’re considering applicants on a rolling basis. Please apply as soon as you’re able — we may give priority to candidates who are able to move through the process sooner.

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.