Operations, product, and leadership roles at EA Funds

Update: We decided against creating any of the roles described below and aren't currently accepting any further applications.

Roles: Product Manager, Operations Specialist, Associate Director, Executive Director

Location: Oxford, UK (though we’ll consider remote)

Summary: Come help us build a team and system that reliably moves tens of millions of dollars per year to impactful projects. You’ll get to work with competent, friendly, and caring people, and if you do well, you will end up running the entire organization. If you’re not sure whether to apply, simply fill in our 15-minute application – we’d love to hear from you!

About EA Funds

  • Through EA Funds, over 4,000 donors gave more than $14 million to effective projects in 2021. These numbers have been growing at 50–100% per year despite only minimal marketing.
  • Our grants have funded excellent independent AI safety research, COVID research that was published in Science, scalable support for EA university groups, Our World In Data’s research and reporting relevant to many EA causes, and animal welfare interventions for chicken and fish in developing countries with fast-growing meat consumption.
  • We’ve been a major funder of new EA projects, and we are scaling our grantmaking and money moved. In the longer term, we plan to become the world’s #1 website for effective giving. We may also set up a program for entrepreneurs to start EA talent outreach projects (perhaps a startup studio). We’ve developed several promising longer-term strategies, but we haven’t yet firmly committed to a particular one. Depending on your interests, you can contribute to our strategy, or focus on executing on our top pick.
  • We’re currently a team of two full-time staff (Jonas Vollmer, Executive Director, and Sam Deere, Head of Tech), with 16 part-time fund managers, and operations support from the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). We’re primarily looking for an Executive Director (ED) or talented people who could grow into an ED role with mentorship.
  • We take our work seriously, but we’re a supportive team and offer flexible working arrangements. You’ll have the opportunity to stretch yourself and develop strong entrepreneurial skills. You’ll also get to learn from an ED with many years of experience founding and running EA organizations, an engineer who co-founded the platform, and grantmakers with excellent judgment, all of whom are caring, friendly, and profoundly dedicated to improving the world.
  • We have good relationships with large funders who we believe would fund us. Our main bottleneck (besides getting more high-quality grant applications) is our staff capacity. If you join EA Funds, you will resolve major bottlenecks and will make a crucial difference to our long-term growth trajectory.

Endorsements:

  • “EA Funds is filling an important niche in the grantmaking ecosystem by creating a way for any small organization or individual in the space to apply for funding. I think they are on a good trajectory, and someone working there will have good opportunities to have a big positive impact.” – Claire Zabel
  • “This was the simplest and best grant process I’ve ever seen. (…) It’s pure pragmatism.” – Ryan Briggs, Assoc Prof, University of Guelph
  • “I've worked under a fair number of bosses and VPs and can confidently say Jonas was [one of] the best by far.” – Kim Korte

About the roles

Because we are an early-stage organization, you will have a broad range of responsibilities, including ones not listed below, and your actual responsibilities will depend on your personal strengths. We list four roles, but plan to hire just 1–2 new staff in total.

We pay competitively and offer a wide range of perks (private health insurance, professional development budget, catered meals, time for learning, generous parental leave, remote/part-time work, etc.). If there’s something you care about, it’s likely we can make it work.

Product Manager

As a Product Manager, your goal is to deliver an excellent product to donors and grantees. You might:

  • Help set up additional funds and hire new fund managers

  • Set up and implement new grant programs, e.g. professional development grants

  • Increase the number of high-quality grant applications by sourcing potential grantees

  • Improve the user experience for our donation process

  • Develop a giving guide so donors can learn how to give effectively

  • Invest EA Funds assets

  • Depending on your personal strengths, potentially take on further responsibilities in communications, operations, design, marketing, or grantmaking

Over time, your role could evolve into that of Senior Product Manager, Head of Product, Associate Director, Executive Director, or similar.

Operations Specialist

As an Operations Specialist, you might:

  • Improve our systems and automations to evaluate and process >2,000 grant applications per year (in collaboration with fund managers and the CEA operations team)

  • Help fund managers with grant evaluations by improving internal collaboration systems

  • Support our grantees operationally 

  • Set up systems to help us evaluate the impact of our grantees’ work

  • Introduce fund managers to EA Funds and help them understand how we operate

  • Depending on your personal strengths, potentially take on further responsibilities in communications, product management, design, marketing, or grantmaking

Over time, the role could evolve into that of Senior Operations Specialist, Product Manager, Head of Operations, Associate Director, Executive Director, or similar. 

Associate Director

In this role, you will run large parts of EA Funds on your own. Your job title will depend on your precise set of responsibilities. You might:

  • Ensure that the product and operations responsibilities listed above are taken care of 

  • Recruit and manage staff as needed – e.g. operations staff, or a product team (i.e., product managers, full-stack engineers, and a front-end designer)

  • Improve our systems so that we can process 100,000 donations per year, worth $100 million, and make 2,000 grants per year (from up to 10,000 grant applications)

  • Depending on your personal strengths, take on further responsibilities in communications, product management, design, marketing, or grantmaking

Over time, the role could evolve into that of Executive Director.

Executive Director

Our team is open to finding a new Executive Director (ED). Jonas Vollmer, our current ED, might be a good fit for several talent outreach projects, and if a great candidate comes forward who could take Jonas’s place and run EA Funds, we think hiring that person as the ED would increase the community’s overall impact. Jonas would remain at EA Funds for as long as needed to ensure EA Funds continues to succeed. 

The ED’s main responsibilities are (in this order):

  1. Ensuring impactful allocation of funding

  2. Ensuring that users (i.e., grantees and donors) are satisfied

  3. Avoiding harmful grants

  4. Increasing money moved

Your work includes developing EA Funds’ strategy, hiring and people management (incl. appointment of excellent fund managers), preventing major risks, and coordinating with other organizations and the broader community.

If you are interested in the role of ED and think you might be a good fit, please fill in our application form or email Jonas directly.

About you

You might be a good fit for one of these roles if:

  • You get a lot done and can juggle many balls without dropping any. You might have run a successful EA student group, organized events, co-founded a startup, managed projects in an entrepreneurial company, or done other work (paid or volunteer) that involved taking on a complex project and making it happen.

  • You are a great writer. You can understand where other people are coming from and tailor your writing to their perspective; you deeply understand EA concepts and can explain them clearly.

  • Especially for product roles: You can build products people love. You interview users regularly to deeply understand their problems, prioritize heavily, move quickly to test new ideas, and go the extra mile to deliver an outstanding experience to donors and grantees.

  • You are good at figuring out well-reasoned solutions for underspecified problems, with solid judgment about tradeoffs between execution speed, quality/durability, stakeholder buy-in, etc.

  • You have a strong growth mindset, you’re autodidactic, and you proactively seek out feedback that helps you improve.

  • Desirable (but can be learned on the job): You have some relevant IT and coding skills (Zapier, Airtable, Google Sheets, JavaScript, SQL).

  • Desirable: Living in or willing to relocate to Oxford, UK

  • For leadership roles: Strong capabilities across a wide range of areas, including grantmaking, hiring, people management, writing, and product management. A strong network in the EA community.

Apply

Our initial application form takes just 15 minutes. We’d love to hear from you!

Apply now

Not sure you’re qualified? Apply anyway. If any of these roles interest you, we’d love to hear from you. We don’t mind spending the time to read and evaluate your application. Some of the best people we’ve worked with in our careers felt underqualified when they first applied, and we’re glad they did so anyway.

If you have any questions, you can reach Jonas at jonas@effectivealtruismfunds.org. (Though if the question is “should I apply?”, the answer is “yes” and the best way forward is filling in our initial application form.)