People Operations Associate

Open Philanthropy is looking for a People Operations Associate to support our team across a range of HR and people-related functions. You will contribute to key processes like onboarding, employee development, and team connectivity while helping to improve our systems and employee experience. 

This role is ideal for someone who is passionate about fostering great employee experiences, enjoys system and process improvement, and cares about Open Phil’s mission. 

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 potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, global health and development, scientific research, global public health policy, farm animal welfare, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. In 2023, we recommended just under $800 million to high-impact causes, and we’ve recommended over $3 billion in grants since our formation.

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 team, we are working to improve these key processes to ensure every employee has great first and last impressions of Open Phil. 

• Developing and retaining employees — we handle biannual performance reviews and promotions, collect feedback on employee engagement and manager satisfaction, connect new employees with mentors, and work to make sure teammates 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 teammates to connect across time zones and focus areas. 

• Helping Open Phil grow — we work with our internal Recruiting and Business Immigration teams to ensure that new team members have a seamless employment experience, no matter where they’re located. 

• Payroll & benefits — while most of these functions are currently contracted out, we serve as Open Phil team members’ main point of contact for questions about pay, benefits, and other organizational policies. 

Most new hires come to Open Phil because they support the organization’s mission. Our goal is to make sure they stay for the mission, the culture, and because it’s simply a great place to work. You’ll be a core part of making that happen by helping us manage, scale, and improve our processes. 

About the Role

The People Operations Associate 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. In this role, you will: 

• Contribute to the planning and execution of People Operations projects

• Review, improve, and streamline our people processes

• Design, manage, and execute critical aspects of our employee experience

Your day-to-day responsibilities may include: 

• Managing and improving our people-related systems and processes. This includes the systems we use to manage HR data, onboarding and offboarding, and employee engagement.

• Overseeing and improving our onboarding experience 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.

• Helping to administer and improve our payroll process and benefits offerings. Part of this work is currently done by external contractors, and we have a longer-term vision to bring this more in-house. You would be a key part of making this happen.

• Supporting our in-person and virtual events, including our quarterly togetherness weeks, annual team retreats, monthly all-hands meetings, and other team gatherings.

That said, it’s hard to predict everything that you might be doing — we’re a rapidly growing organization, and expect all teammates to be flexible about what they work on and put contributing to our mission first. 

Who we’re looking for

We’d like applicants to have at least 2-3 years of operations experience. Prior experience in HR, people operations, benefits administration, or similar work is a bonus, but not a requirement for consideration. You might be a great fit for this work if you:

• Treat internal stakeholders as customers, and want to make sure they walk away feeling helped whenever they interact with you or your team.

• Enjoy bringing order to chaos, thrive in a dynamic environment, and find satisfaction in creating efficient systems and processes.

• Have a track record of taking on poorly scoped projects, figuring out what problem you need to solve, and proactively getting them over the finish line.

• Are comfortable navigating sensitive conversations around employee satisfaction and performance, and can be trusted with confidential information (e.g., employee survey feedback or compensation data).

• Are intensely detail-oriented and notice errors that others might overlook; you can confidently track and update employee data without making mistakes, accurately update multiple spreadsheets with compensation data, etc.

• 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 building — we support teammates in being ambitious about their impact and living out Open Phil’s operating values in their day-to-day work. 

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

• Cultivate a high level of trust with Open Philanthropy teammates. 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 to generate concrete recommendations related to compensation, retention, employee experience, and other challenges. 

• Understand and empathize with the different worldviews represented among the Open Philanthropy team. There are a wide range of values and perspectives on our team, and you will sometimes need to resolve or manage points of tension.

Across roles, we value teammates 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.

Role details & benefits 

• Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $112,719.22, which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $98,016.71 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $14,702.51. 

  • 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.

  • For internationally based team members, all compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary.

• Time zones and location: You can work from anywhere. While we are unable 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 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 teammates to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive

  • 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 can’t always provide every benefit we offer US teammates 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, but may have some flexibility for the right candidate.

Applications are due by Sunday, November 10th at 11:59pm PT. Please apply as soon as you can — we may prioritize candidates who can 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.

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.