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By Jacob Trefethen —

Hiring scientists to give away money

Screenshot of an Open Philanthropy job description (excerpt)
Excerpt from a job description for Senior Program Associates. We are also hiring for a Program Officer.

At Open Philanthropy, we have given away $600 million in biomedical research since 2016. That funding has supported the work of thousands of scientists across hundreds of universities, nonprofits, and companies around the world.

Science is hard to predict. Most hard problems are hard for a reason, and we've hit plenty of dead ends. Promising observations end up not being causal, results from lab experiments don't generalise to the real world, clinical trials face multiyear delays to get started and sometimes drugs just don't work.

And yet... our grantees have made discoveries affecting millions of people's lives. Severely malnourished children now more often get omega 3 to boost their cognitive development, and thousands of children screened for sickle cell disease are able to get the treatment they need, and TB patients now have more options for affordable drugs. As I type, scientists we've supported are inventing and testing new technologies that may help millions more people, in maternal and newborn health, immunology, protein design, tuberculosis, malaria, rheumatic heart disease, hepatitis B/C/D/E, sepsis, and beyond.

Making good grants is part science, part art, and we've been honing our craft. We aim to have as much positive impact on people's health as possible, over the long run, and now it is time to go bigger. To do that, we need help.

We are hiring:

  • Up to 3 Senior Program Associates, working with our existing world-leading Program Officers to scale up our giving
  • A Program Officer to help us spend tens of millions more on strep A vaccine development, since strep A alone leads to 600,000 deaths per year (you need to be a scientist but not necessarily a strep A expert for this one!)

We are open to remote candidates (more details on the job descriptions); baseline compensation for each role is $126,233.59 and $188,255.37. The deadline to apply is December 4th, 11:59pm Pacific Time.

If you're unsure, or enjoy your current job and aren't particularly looking for a change, or are on the academic job market too – chuck in an application anyway and see what happens. We're open to unconventional applicants, and later in the process there's a compensated work test where graders are blind to your identity. I can never predict who will do well on those, and applicants often can't either; usually there's a happy surprise or two. Apply here and here.