[CLOSED] Legal Assistant

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    Open Philanthropy is looking to hire a Legal Assistant to support the day-to-day work of our Legal team.

    About Open Philanthropy

    Open Philanthropy is a grantmaker; 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. We’re particularly interested in high-risk, high-reward giving that may be too unconventional for other funders. Our current giving areas include global health and development, scientific research, farm animal welfare, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. 

    About the Legal Team

    Open Philanthropy’s Legal team provides well-calibrated legal advice and engages in collaborative and creative problem-solving. As a Legal Assistant you would: 

    • Process contracts – you’ll organize the logistics of all the contracts that Open Philanthropy enters into; this can be for IT consultants, venues for events, research to produce reports or any number of other things. You’ll intake the information outlining the desired contractual relationship, generate the contract, handle communications with the vendor and coordinate with the finance department to process payment. 
    • Provide administrative support – you’ll update our grant agreement and contract templates, maintain our document filing systems, coordinate scheduling, take notes and generally make sure things are running smoothly. 
    • Facilitate cross-team projects and functions – legal work often intersects with work that other teams own, including financial compliance and grant compliance; the legal assistant will work with other teams to ensure frictionless handoff.
    • Assist with legal team needs – this might include making travel arrangements, doing expense reports, reviewing bills from outside firms and other things that will free up attorney time. 

    Who we’re looking for 

    There are no formal degree or work experience requirements for either role, and we’re open to considering both applicants brand new to operations work, as well as more experienced candidates. You might be a great fit for this work if you:

    • Work in a responsive, agile way; you stay calm when conditions change and are able to improvise and pivot quickly when priorities shift.
    • Have a “getting to yes,” solutions-focused approach to handling requests. When someone comes to you with a problem, you want them to come away with a solution, even if that solution looks different from their original ask. 
    • Are excited to contribute to impact-driven work in a supportive capacity; you know that behind-the-scenes tasks are important, even if they seem indirect or tedious at face value.
    • Have a track record of demonstrating (or are excited to develop) an “operations mindset” — proactively noticing what’s broken, moving fast to fix it, and continually identifying opportunities to do more with the same amount of time and resources. 
    • Are passionate about Open Phil’s mission and excited to support our work in cause areas such as AI safety, biorisk reduction, or EA community-building. You don’t need to be a subject matter expert in any of these fields, but we are looking for someone who is comfortable operating within the frameworks we use to think about our work, such as worldview diversification and cause prioritization.
    • Some familiarity with legal work is preferred, but not required

    We expect all our staff to: 

    • Put our mission first, and act with urgency to help us realize our ambitious goals for impact. 
    • Work to model our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration and inclusiveness. 

    Role details & benefits 

    • Compensation: The compensation for this role will be $93,699.04. This would be distributed as a base salary of $81,477.43 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $12,221.61.
      • The 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.
    • 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 US business hours. Our current team is split between the West and East Coasts of the United States.
    • Benefits: Our benefits package includes: 
      • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any 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 
        • We can’t always provide every benefit we offer US 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’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.

    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.