About Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a philanthropic funder and advisor; 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 navigating transformative artificial intelligence, global health and development, scientific research, global public health policy, farm animal welfare, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. In 2024, we recommended $650 million to high-impact causes, and we’ve recommended over $4.8 billion in grants since our formation.

About the Recruiting team

Open Philanthropy is growing rapidly. The organization has almost doubled in size over the past two years, and the Recruiting team has overseen every step of those acquisitions, helping teams do everything from identifying their initial hiring needs to making final offers. We develop and implement the systems by which Open Philanthropy finds and evaluates top talent, and serve as its institutional memory and point of call for all things hiring. The team currently has eight members, led by Phil Zealley. Open Philanthropy's impact relies on having top talent work on important problems. To support that mission, we’re looking to add more recruiters to enable Open Philanthropy to grow our team and our impact.

Recruiting at Open Philanthropy comprises two primary workstreams — pipeline development and round management. Roughly, pipeline development is everything we do to get strong candidates to apply, and round management is everything we do to help hiring managers hire the strongest candidate from the applicant pool. Recruiters generally specialize in one of these two workstreams, though they may periodically assist in the other. This posting is for both the round management and pipeline development workstreams — we aim to make multiple hires.

What you'd be doing

You'll represent Open Philanthropy to candidates, hiring managers, and external partners, serving as a key face of the organization. Regardless of your primary focus, you'll spend time maintaining and improving our recruiting systems and working on strategic projects. Recent examples include developing hiring forecasts, updating evaluation processes in response to LLM developments, and building new dashboards for data analysis.

If you focus on round management, you'll own hiring projects from start to finish, typically managing several rounds simultaneously. This includes:

• Project management: Determining evaluation steps, planning round timelines, guiding hiring managers through the process, coordinating stakeholders and information streams at key decision points, and tracking the overall progress of the round to make sure nothing (and no one) falls through the cracks.

• Candidate evaluation: Reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, and developing or advising on work tests.

• Providing guidance: Advising hiring managers on key decisions, maintaining legal compliance, and upholding the overall standards of the hiring process.

• Stakeholder management: Interfacing with candidates, responding to questions and requests, and ensuring that all parties are kept up to speed as rounds evolve.

• Infrastructure: Setting up and maintaining the back-end systems for each round to ensure a seamless operation from start to finish.

If you focus on pipeline development, you'll own and contribute to a variety of sourcing efforts that help us to find and engage strong candidates. This involves:

• High-priority round sourcing: Leading on sourcing for many of our hiring rounds by finding and inviting leads, taking informational calls with promising candidates, responding to indications of interest, and promoting our job opportunities across a variety of external channels. This will make up the majority of your work.

• Network building & partnerships: Cultivating our internal and external referral networks. This includes managing relationships with external partners (such as grantees, relevant community organizers, and peer organizations) and serving as a primary point of contact for the recruiting team.

• Events & representation: Traveling to relevant conferences (e.g., EA Global, the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative) to represent Open Phil and develop relationships with potential referrers.

• Improving systems & reporting: Maintaining and improving systems for tracking leads, relationships, and sourcing outcomes, ensuring these systems effectively capture pipeline health and sourcing efforts for senior leadership.

• Employer brand collaboration: Shaping how we present ourselves to potential candidates and guiding updates to platforms like our Careers page and Glassdoor account, occasionally collaborating with Open Phil's Communications team on employer branding efforts.

All that said, it's hard to predict everything you might do. We're a rapidly growing organization where priorities can shift, and all staff pitch in across different areas to support our mission. While you'll specialize in one workstream, you may occasionally assist with the other.

Who we're looking for

We think people from a variety of backgrounds could be great fits for our team. The relative importance of different skills will vary depending on which workstream you'd focus on, but we're looking for candidates who bring many of the qualities outlined below.

You might be a great fit for this work if you:

• Have strong project management skills. You are highly organized in your own work, and also able to ensure other stakeholders stay on track. You'll obsess over maintaining a clean candidate pipeline.

• Have strong interpersonal and communication skills. You'll represent Open Philanthropy to candidates, external partners, and hiring managers. You can build trust, convey what's compelling about working here, navigate sensitive conversations effectively, and maintain a high degree of transparency.

• Like to move fast, get things done, and prioritize aggressively. We treat all recruiting work as urgent by default.

• Enjoy thinking about people and organizational needs. You can assess individual potential against complex role requirements, take a broad, systems-level view of Open Philanthropy's talent needs across diverse cause areas, and connect strategy to long-term goals.

• Are excited about supporting Open Phil's work across cause areas. You'll need enough context to identify and interface effectively with people working across our cause areas, whether that's biosecurity, navigating transformative AI, abundance and growth, or effective giving and careers. You don't need to be a subject matter expert in any of these fields, but you should be passionate about our mission.

• Are conscientious and organized — you're reliable and responsive, and make sure important deliverables and relationships don't fall through the cracks.

• Enjoy iterating and improving processes. You're skilled at breaking down complex workflows and optimizing them for clarity and efficiency.

Experience requirements:

• For round management, we're looking for candidates with at least a year (and likely more) of operations experience who have successfully managed fast-moving processes.

• For pipeline development, direct prior experience leading a sourcing or pipeline development function is not required, but we expect the strongest candidates might have relevant experience in areas like recruiting, partnerships, or EA/GCR community building.

While not required, we'd be excited about:

• Past experience with talent sourcing, executive search, or recruiting

• Existing networks or experience in technical AI safety, global catastrophic risks, or adjacent spheres

The ideal candidate for this position will possess many of the skills and experiences described above. However, there is no such thing as a "perfect" candidate. If you are on the fence about applying because you are unsure whether you are qualified, we strongly encourage you to do so.

Role details & benefits

• Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $116,977.12, which (for U.S. hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $101,719.24 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $15,257.88.

  • These compensation figures assume a remote location; we offer higher compensation for candidates located in San Francisco or Washington, D.C.

  • All compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary for internationally based hires.

• Time zones and location: You can work remotely. While we aren’t able to sponsor visas for this role, we are open to hires outside the US willing to consistently overlap with U.S. business hours for at least 5-6 hours of the day. Our current team is dispersed from the Pacific U.S. through U.K. time zones.

• Benefits: Our benefits package includes:

• Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the U.S. 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. This policy also includes a productivity benefit, which provides a set amount for staff to expense items that enhance their productivity.

• A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered.

• 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 currently have offices in San Francisco and Washington D.C., and multiple staff working from several other cities in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• We can’t always provide every benefit we offer U.S. 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 expect to make offers by late January, and hope new hires can start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, though we understand that some candidates may need longer to exit existing commitments. If this timeline doesn’t work for you, please err on the side of applying anyway and let us know in your application in case we can make alternate arrangements.

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 as soon as you can — we may give priority to candidates who are able to move through the process sooner. The role will close for applications at midnight Pacific Time on November 23, 2025.

US-based Operations staff are typically employed by Open Philanthropy Project LLC, which is not a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. As such, this role is unlikely to be eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.

Open Philanthropy may use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, including natural language processing and predictive analytics, to assist in the initial screening of employment applications. These AI/ML tools assess applications against the characteristics and qualifications relevant to the job requisition. These tools are designed to help identify potentially qualified candidates, but they do not make automated hiring decisions. The AI/ML-generated assessments are one of several factors considered in the hiring process. Our human recruiting team will thoroughly evaluate your skills and qualifications to determine your suitability for the role.

If you prefer not to have your application assessed using AI/ML features, you may opt out by reaching out to jobs@openphilanthropy.org and letting us know. Opting out will not negatively impact your application, which will be reviewed manually by our team.