CLOSED: Operations Manager

About the role

The Operations Manager will be responsible for overseeing and managing a team that handles all customer-service oriented aspects of our day-to-day operations, including facilities management, ensuring our internal processes run smoothly, fielding support requests for our team, and problem solving/troubleshooting issues as needed in both our San Francisco office and our smaller co-working space in Washington, D.C.

We’ve described some categories your work will fall into below:

• Office management. You will be responsible for ensuring a positive employee experience at our San Francisco and DC work spaces. This will include both specific tasks related to reopening our office post-pandemic, and ongoing duties such as managing reception, handling mail, managing and improving our office food program, and other upkeep.
• Recurring processes. This will involve managing processes such as publishing grant pages on our website, processing invoices, onboarding new hires, sending communications to staff and keeping various repositories of internal information organized and up-to-date.
• Support for individual staff members. You will triage and assign tasks from our queue of inbound support requests (e.g. scheduling/calendar management for a senior staff person, data cleaning, taking notes on calls with grantees, assisting the recruiting team with tasks such as emailing candidates and tracking work tests).
• Manage Operations Assistants. You will oversee two or more Operations Assistants to help deliver on the above objectives.

Your team will also tackle longer-term projects related to the categories above (e.g. deciding when and whether it’s appropriate to hire an IT specialist or move offices). Over time, we hope the Operations Manager will take on more responsibility, and have the opportunity to grow into either an expanded scope of responsibility on our operations team or move into a more specialized operations role, depending on interest (e.g., grants management, recruiting, people operations).

About you

The Operations team’s goal is to provide excellent support to the organization as well as our grantees and collaborators. Our long-term vision is to develop the infrastructure and capacity to support a much higher volume of giving, while maintaining our current quality of service. In this role you would own the operations’ team’s efforts to ensure that our office is a productive and welcoming environment, and that staff are able to focus on their work by minimizing unnecessary bureaucracy and friction. You might be a great fit for this role if you:

• Are excited to save others time so they can do their best work, and are motivated by the idea of managing a team focused on meeting this need. You take pride in ensuring that everyone who comes into contact with you and your team gets the help they need smoothly and efficiently, and believe that no request is too small to merit attention.
• Are able to communicate effectively, and in a professional and welcoming manner. You will be the face of the Open Philanthropy office to both our staff and a variety of internal and external stakeholders; e.g. you will need to coordinate with external vendors, respond to inbound email inquiries and greet guests as they enter the office.
• Take pride in making sure small details are accounted for. You are organized and able to keep on top of a large number of open items, and are comfortable dealing with unexpected occurrences and quickly troubleshooting as needed.
• Constantly seek out improvements and question the status quo in pursuit of a better system. You are good at thinking on behalf of an organization as a whole, embracing constructive feedback, and designing holistic solutions that take different stakeholders’ needs into account.
• Are service-minded. You want to contribute to what Open Philanthropy needs most, even if it’s not glamorous, and don’t mind doing relatively mundane tasks if needed (e.g. helping set up a workspace, fixing a broken printer).
• Are familiar with the ideas of effective altruism and are excited to work at an EA-aligned organization.

We are open to candidates with varying levels of experience. We expect that successful candidates will have a minimum of 1-2 years of management experience (ideally more). We also expect that successful candidates will have a minimum of 3 years work experience, and ideally more than 5. Experience with IT and experience managing one or more employees to deliver high quality support services would be a bonus, but is not required for this role.

Across roles, we value staff who are able to communicate clearly and honestly about what they think, are comfortable giving and receiving feedback (including upward feedback for their manager or the organization), and 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 here.

Additional information

• This is a full-time position based out of our office in San Francisco. The baseline compensation for this role is $150,901.66 which includes a base salary of $131,218.83 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $19,682.82.
• Ideally, we would like a candidate to be able to begin as soon as possible after receiving an offer (likely in February); however, we are willing to wait if the best candidate can only start later.
• We offer a comprehensive benefits package which includes paying all the premiums for health, dental, vision and life insurance. We also offer a stipend for purchasing ergonomic equipment to help ensure you stay healthy while you work.
• Unfortunately, we are unable to sponsor visas for this role.

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from self-identified women and people of color who are excited about contributing to our mission. Open Philanthropy is an equal opportunity employer. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@openphilanthropy.org.