Chief of Staff, Global Catastrophic Risks

About the team and role

GCR’s leadership team, Emily Oehlsen and George Rosenfeld, oversees strategy and coordination across all GCR programs.

This role will report to George and work closely with both Emily and George to accelerate the GCR team’s progress on its priorities. It will focus on supporting GCR’s central leadership activities, including setting and communicating division-wide strategy, making sure that each of the program teams is on track and set up to succeed, and leading on the identification and execution of priority expansion areas for the division.

This role sits further from our day-to-day grantmaking work than the others in this round but provides direct access to senior leadership and decision-making. We think it has the potential to amplify the impact of the whole GCR team and also provides an excellent platform for those looking to grow in leadership and strategy roles.

Unique responsibilities

• Compared to the other roles in this round, this opportunity will be especially focused on supporting and improving the decision-making and priorities of senior leadership, and amplifying the impact of the wider division. You will work with Emily and George on many of their top priorities, support and boost their work, act as a thought partner, and own broader initiatives yourself.
• Example projects:
• Design and organize a “listening tour” for Emily and George to solicit feedback from field leaders on the GCR team’s strategy, and identify key gaps in the GCR ecosystem that the team should prioritize.
• Based on discussion with Emily, George, and GCR team leads, write a memo describing how much of the GCR team’s work is betting on short timelines to transformative AI, and what it could do to move in either direction.
• Lead or oversee the investigation to identify GCR’s next area of expansion, present this recommendation to senior leadership, and potentially spin up a new team to execute this new line of work.
• Design and coordinate GCR strategy sessions at organizational retreats.
• Build and execute an outreach strategy for attracting senior candidates to high-priority positions across the GCR teams.
• Ensure that the Open Philanthropy board is regularly updated about the GCR team’s progress and that key stakeholders across the team receive updates after each board meeting.
• Develop and implement new approaches for cross-team coordination and communication within the GCR division.
• Own or provide recommendations on smaller questions and projects that regularly come across Emily and George’s desks.

Unique candidate criteria

You might be a particularly great fit for this role if you:

• Are excited about reducing global catastrophic risks broadly and are committed to achieving the team’s goals.
• Are generally familiar with global catastrophic risk and have basic context around areas such as AI safety and biosecurity, but you don’t have technical expertise in any specific focus area.
• [Ideally] Have previous senior-level experience in a Chief of Staff role or other senior generalist roles such as management or operations leadership.

Other details

• Location: There are no hard location requirements for this role, though we prefer candidates based in (or willing to relocate to) Washington, D.C., London, or the San Francisco Bay Area — and/or candidates who are able to travel frequently to those locations to facilitate regular in-person work. Candidates will need to be available for most of a working day in the U.S. East Coast time zones, with some overlap where necessary with London and the U.S. West Coast.
• We’ll support candidates with the costs of relocation to the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington, D.C.
• We are happy to consider candidates based outside of the U.S. and to consider sponsoring U.S. work authorization. However, we don’t control who is and isn’t eligible for a visa, and we can’t guarantee visa approval.
• Compensation: This is a full-time, permanent position. The starting compensation for this role will be either $172,388.73 or $188,255.37 per year depending on the experience of the successful candidate, which would include a base salary of $149,903.24 or $165,255.37 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $22,485.49 or $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 hires.
• Start date: We would ideally like a candidate to begin as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we are willing to wait if the best candidate can only start later.