Senior Program Associate, Global Aid Policy

Open Philanthropy is looking to hire a Senior Program Associate to join our Global Aid Policy team. 

The team currently consists of two full-time staff members, supported by Open Philanthropy’s wider research and operations teams. By joining, you would help us substantially increase our impact by enabling us to investigate a wider range of opportunities, ultimately resulting in better grants.

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.

About the Global Aid Policy Team

The Global Aid Policy program, launched in 2022 and led by Norma Altshuler, seeks to increase the amount and the impact of wealthy countries’ foreign aid.

As a team, we have unusual flexibility about our policy agenda. We’re open to any approach that could substantially increase the quantity and/or quality of aid and other forms of development finance that can improve people’s health and well-being. We do not have sector or geographic restrictions. We fund a wide range of tactics, from lobbying, to incubating new advocacy or research organizations, to directly supporting analytical capacity within aid agencies.

Examples include incubating a coalition of business leaders working to increase Korea’s health aid, funding faith advocates working to prevent aid cuts in Sweden, and funding technical support that aid agency leaders request to help them design and implement evidence-based programs. You can find some of our preliminary areas of interest here.

**During our first two years, we’ve experimented with grants in more than ten donor countries.**So far, the bulk of our work has been in the U.S., Japan, and Korea. We also expect to continue to evolve our geographic focus and our policy agenda over time based on where we think we can do the most good. We identify new policy goals and assess what pursuing these goals could achieve by working with government officials, external advisors (including individuals who can advise on what’s politically feasible in different contexts), other Open Phil program teams, and the Open Phil research team. We’re looking for colleagues who are excited about contributing to this evolution.

About the Role

You will primarily focus on identifying and assessing grant opportunities. This will help the team execute on existing priorities and expand the scope of its work (e.g. leading investigations to cover new geographic regions or new strategies). You might own a sub-strategy and be responsible for developing a grant portfolio in the low millions of dollars per year that focuses on a specific policy goal or donor country.

You will also contribute to other aspects of the program’s analytical work, such as strategic planning and investigating grants that are outside of your core portfolio. You will speak with leaders in the field to identify promising grantees, analyze whether a grant will cost-effectively advance our program’s priorities, write up your reasoning for making specific grants, and continue to follow the progress of the grants you recommend (e.g. running check-in calls with grantees and advising the team on whether there’s a case for renewing the grant). You will periodically represent Open Philanthropy publicly to others in the field, such as policymakers and other funders. 

About You

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

• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills, especially the ability to quickly grasp complex issues, identify and evaluate key questions, and make strategic decisions.

• Good written communication skills, especially the ability to articulate your views clearly and with strong reasoning transparency.

• A willingness to acknowledge tradeoffs and use evidence to inform your decisions.

• An interest in pragmatically analyzing the most cost-effective ways to maximize our impact. As part of grant investigations, you will conduct back of the envelope calculations (BOTECs) that estimate the social return on investment of different grant opportunities. You don’t need to have experience with this kind of work, but you do need to show strong capacity to quantitatively estimate benefits with imperfect information.

• Strong interpersonal skills. You will need to be able to build rapport and relationships with grantees, peer funders, and advisors, and sometimes communicate about sensitive topics. You will periodically represent Open Philanthropy to external audiences, including peer funders and government officials.

• The capacity to work effectively with ideologically and culturally diverse partner organizations across multiple countries.

• Relevant experience, including in or adjacent to policy work. This could come from working in government or in an organization that tries to influence governments, such as a think tank or advocacy group. Experience in aid policy is preferred but not required. Candidates who have a policy background in areas other than international aid policy (e.g. domestic public policy) will be more competitive if they also have significant experience in global development.

  • Candidates with experience in the U.S., Korea, and/or Japan would help us improve on our current lines of work. However, we’d also be excited to hire a generalist, or someone with a compelling vision for how we can achieve outsized impact in a country we haven’t worked in extensively before.

• The capacity to travel. The amount of travel required will depend on your home working location. Someone who lives in the area where their work is primarily focused — e.g. someone in Washington DC focused on the US, or someone in Seoul focused on Korea — will need to travel less than someone living in a different location than their primary focus area. We would like candidates to be able to travel at least two times per year for in-person meetings with colleagues in the Bay Area, though there is some flexibility for the right candidate.

• Excitement about our mission.

All of the above said, there's no such thing as a perfect candidate; we don't expect a successful hire to excel on all of the dimensions here. If you are on the fence about applying because you are unsure whether you are qualified, we would strongly encourage you to apply.

Role details and benefits

• Compensation:

  • The compensation for this role is $160,355.45, which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $139,439.53 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $20,915.93.

  • The compensation figures for the roles 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:

  • We prefer candidates who are located in an area that allows them to regularly meet relevant interlocutors. We expect that hires outside the US will regularly be available to have several hours of meetings a week with team members in California. We can account for your time zone and preferences within California business hours when we schedule meetings.  

    • We are happy to consider sponsoring U.S. work authorization. However, we don’t control who is and isn’t eligible for a visa and can’t guarantee visa approval.

• 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
  • 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.

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.

Please apply by 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on May 12th to be considered.