People Operations Leadership

Open Philanthropy is looking for a People Operations leader who can advance our goals around HR and team support. You will lead our People Operations team (currently three team members), will serve as a trusted advisor on HR and people-related functions, and will help shape strategies to support our team’s ambitious work.

This role could accommodate an early-to-mid-career leader who is capable of managing a team and owning our technical HR function, or a more senior leader with strategic experience who is also ready to take on additional, higher-level responsibilities.

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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. You will work with and through your team on core areas:

• 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.
• Developing and retaining employees — our team handles biannual performance reviews and promotions, collects feedback on employee engagement and manager satisfaction, connects new employees with mentors, and works to make sure staff at Open Phil have the tools they need to grow and succeed.
• 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.

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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.

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About the Role

This role sits within our Internal Operations team and reports to our Director of Internal Operations, Anna Weldon. The key focus of this role will be overseeing and maintaining our core people- and HR-related infrastructure and operations. You will lead a small team of three individual contributors in developing and maintaining a strong, supportive, and customer-focused People Operations function.

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The main responsibilities include:

• Managing the People Operations team. You will manage a small team of People Operations professionals and set priorities for the team in collaboration with key stakeholders and leadership.
• Team prioritization. You will prioritize improvement projects and new initiatives through the lens of what’s most important for supporting our team members’ work and meeting Open Philanthropy’s goals.
• Ensuring compliance. You will oversee and resolve compliance-related inquiries pertaining to hiring and employment law, in collaboration with our in-house legal team. You will help guide our team’s HR-related decision-making, implementing the right combination of flexibility and best practices.
• Payroll & benefits. You will help to improve our payroll process and benefits offerings. Part of this work is currently done by external contractors.
• Stakeholder management. You will work to understand Open Philanthropy’s key stakeholders and their needs, and how you and your team can best support them.

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A higher level role’s responsibilities could additionally include:

• Strategic planning and leadership. You would set the overall vision and strategic direction for team support at Open Phil.
• Management support. You would help develop our culture around management and how we support and develop our management team, and you would be a point person in coaching and navigating challenging interpersonal situations.
• Culture & engagement. You would help define and track our goals for Open Phil’s culture. This would include overseeing our biannual employee engagement survey and making recommendations based on the results.

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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.

We’re looking for someone who deeply understands Open Philanthropy’s mission, shares our vision for the kind of organization we are working to become, and has the skills and experience to maintain a strong people operations function.

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We think you might be a great fit for this role if you:

• Have a strong background in HR. You have significant experience in Human Resources or People Operations, and have a strong understanding of best practices around hiring, employment, payroll, and benefits. Our ideal candidate would have at least five years of prior experience in HR / People Operations, but we are open to applicants with varying levels of experience.
• Are an experienced leader. You have a track record of success autonomously managing projects and people, navigating complex questions to make good decisions, and determining what's most important for the team to focus on.
• Have a drive to question and improve systems, while also understanding when we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You will bring both a sense of ambition around what we can aim for, and strong judgment around best practices, keeping the team focused on what matters most.
• 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
• Work in a way that is consistent with our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration and inclusiveness, and feel you can model those values for others on your team and provide coaching and correction as needed. You have a low-ego, collaborative approach and are excited to give and receive feedback.
• 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.

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Additional requirements for a higher-level role:

• Have at least five years of experience in strategic team leadership, management coaching, and employee engagement.
• Have an exceptional level of context on Open Philanthropy’s mission and the goals we’re trying to achieve.

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To succeed in this position, we think it will be necessary to

• Cultivate a high level of trust with Open Philanthropy staff. You should have a knack for building rapport with others, handling people's feedback sensitively, and making people from a variety of backgrounds feel heard.
• Be able to analyze and use data as input to generate concrete policy recommendations related to compensation, retention, and other challenges.
• Understand and empathize with the different worldviews represented among Open Philanthropy staff. We have a wide range of values and perspectives represented on our staff, and will sometimes need to resolve or manage points of tension.

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Across roles, we value staff who are able to communicate clearly and honestly about what they think, are comfortable giving and receiving feedback, and are interested in taking ownership of their work and proactively seeking ways to help Open Philanthropy meet its goals. For more information about the qualities we look for in employees at Open Philanthropy, see our operating values.

Compensation:

• The baseline compensation for this role is $144,736.49, which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $125,857.82 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $18,878.67.
• For the higher-level version of the role, compensation would be $176,371.49, distributed as a base salary of $153,371.49 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $23,000.00.
• 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.

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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
• 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 ideally no later than July.

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

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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 accommodations 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 April 19th to be considered.

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