Operations Associate / Manager

--- This role is now closed ---

The Center on Long-term Risk is seeking an Operations Associate, to work on supporting and improving the operational processes and infrastructure that enable our researchers’ work. You will therefore act as a multiplier on our team’s productivity, and so play an important role in furthering CLR’s mission to address worst-case risks from the development and deployment of advanced AI systems. (More experienced candidates may be appointed as Operations Manager.)

In this role, you would become the second full member of our Operations team, reporting to our Operations Lead, and taking on responsibilities across diverse areas such as office management, HR, finance, compliance and recruitment – making this role ideal for quickly gaining operations experience. You will receive mentorship from an experienced operations team, and become familiar with existing operational processes in a well-running organisation, as you work to improve and supplement them.

To apply for this role, please submit this application form. The deadline for applications is the end of Sunday 11th September (precisely: 7:30am British Summer Time on Monday 12th). We expect the form will take 30-60 minutes to complete. It can be done in as little as 10 minutes if necessary by skipping the descriptive questions: this may significantly disadvantage your application, but may make sense if you wouldn’t apply otherwise. 

--- This role is now closed ---

Job description

Responsibilities

We are recruiting for this role in order to provide additional capacity in our operations function, and the Operations Lead plans to hand over a number of areas of responsibility to the successful candidate. Precisely which areas you work on will depend on your strengths and interests, and we’ll decide this together with you once you start work. 

As an illustration of the sorts of things you’ll work on, we expect that the successful candidate will take on several of the following tasks: 

  • Running our new 30-person office space, situated across the top 2 floors of a building in Primrose Hill, London. Tasks here could include improvements to furniture and design, managing our office cook, and handling utilities and services.
  • Handling and refining our processes for finance and accounting tasks, including payments and reimbursements, bookkeeping and donation management.
  • Running events for our team, including team retreats, celebrations and socials.
  • Managing and developing our people processes, including onboarding and offboarding staff, facilitating staff performance reviews, and supporting staff welfare.
  • Providing work-related personal assistance services to staff .
  • Improving our IT systems and security.

Examples of further responsibilities that a candidate who is a good fit for them could take on include:

  • Providing operational infrastructure for hiring rounds
  • Payroll (in collaboration with our accountants)
  • Grantmaking operations
  • Visas and immigration

We also plan to train the successful candidate in some of the Operations Lead’s areas of responsibility, in order to provide better resilience.

About you 

We think this role could provide suitable challenges for someone with 0-4 years’ experience in a similar job: it might, for example, be suited to a recent graduate interested in quickly gaining experience in operations, and we also encourage more experienced candidates to apply. 

The following abilities and qualities are what we’re looking for in candidates. No specific qualifications or experience are required – experience is one good way of demonstrating these skills, but we’re also open to candidates with no experience of similar roles. We encourage you to apply if you think you may be a good fit, even if you are very unsure of your strengths in some of these areas.

  • Organised: In this role you will often have a large number of competing responsibilities. You will need to keep track of them effectively, and prioritise between them appropriately.
  • Problem-solving ability: We’re a small organisation and regularly find ourselves in new operational situations. You will need to think creatively to find solutions to problems.
  • Good communicator: A significant part of your role will be responding to other team members’ operational needs. As such, it’s important that you be able to communicate with team members effectively and sensitively. 
  • Proactive: In this role you will have your own areas of responsibility, and will need to independently work towards your goals, proactively identifying opportunities for improvement.
  • Attention to detail: In areas such as finance, attention to detail can save a lot of time coming back and fixing mistakes later.
  • Good IT skills: We use digital systems heavily in our work, and it’s important that you be able to quickly learn how to use new digital services.
  • Willing to take on basic administrative tasks alongside more strategic ones.

In addition to the above, familiarity with the effective altruism community and its priorities are a significant benefit. 

Further details

  • Work quota: We are open to full-time or part-time candidates, with a preference for full-time.
  • Location: We prefer applicants who will work in-person from our London office. However, we are willing to consider applicants who wish to work partly or entirely remotely.
  • International applicants: We are a registered UK visa sponsor, and willing to sponsor visas for applicants interested in moving to the UK to take up this position. 

Salary

  • The base salary for this role is £45,000-£60,000 per year depending on the candidate.
    • For part-time applicants, the salary will be scaled down proportionally to your working hours. 
    • For applicants based outside London, the salary will be adjusted based on local living costs, in accordance with our compensation policy.
  • We don’t want salary to be what stops someone from contributing to our mission. If you’re interested in this role and CLR’s work but would require a higher salary, we encourage you to go ahead and apply and we’re open to discussing higher compensation.

Benefits

  • 25 days’ paid vacation per year, plus public holidays.
  • Private health and travel insurance.
  • Pension scheme with default employer contribution of 10% of your qualifying earnings, increasing to 15% to match additional contributions made by you.
  • Catered plant-based lunch available at the office every day.
  • A budget of £2000 per year to spend on your professional development and productivity.
  • Flexible working hours.
  • 20 weeks’ paid leave for new parents.
  • We will pay reasonable relocation costs for candidates who move to London to take up the role.

Why this role?

Role impact

In this role, you will enable our other staff’s productivity, and so support our mission to reduce worst-case risks from the development of AI systems. CLR’s activities include:

  • Grantmaking: In addition to the CLR Fund, some of our staff are advising the Center for Emerging Risk Research (CERR), a foundation committed to using all of their funds (over $100 million) to improve the quality of life of future generations.
  • Technical interventions: We aim to develop and communicate insights about the safe development of artificial intelligence to the relevant stakeholders (e.g., AI developers, key organizations in the longtermist effective altruism community).
  • Governance interventions: We aim to develop and help implement appropriate governance structures for the safe development of artificial intelligence.
  • New projects: In collaboration with people in our network, we are always looking for novel impactful organizations to set up. For instance, we have been involved in the founding of the Cooperative AI Foundation and Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab. Previously, we established Wild Animal Suffering Research, which later merged with Utility Farm to become the Wild Animal Initiative, a now independent organisation.

Aside from CERR, CLR has received major grants from Open Philanthropy and the Survival and Flourishing Fund.

Professional development

Due to the small size of our organisation, your work will be varied and you will quickly gain experience across a wide variety of operations areas. CLR regularly encounters new operational situations, such as employing staff in a new country, or supporting the launch of a new charity, which will give you ample opportunities to extend your skills to new contexts.   

CLR will also actively support your professional development. While we are looking for a candidate who is interested in working with CLR for a substantial period of time, as part of the effective altruism community we are interested in helping you increase your career’s impact even beyond your performance in the current role. Alongside mentorship from our experienced operations team, you will be joining a well-networked longtermist organisation. You will receive a budget of £2,000 per year to spend on whatever you think best furthers your professional development, and be supported to attend EA Global conferences twice annually if you’re interested.

Application process & how to apply

Stage 1: To apply for this role, please submit this application form. The deadline for applications is the end of Sunday 11th September (precisely: 7:30am British Summer Time on Monday 12th). 

We expect the form will take 30-60 minutes to complete. If necessary, the form can be done in as little as 10 minutes by skipping the descriptive questions: this may significantly disadvantage your application, but may make sense if you wouldn’t apply otherwise. 

We aim to communicate the results of stage 1, inviting candidates to the second stage, by the end of Friday 16th September. 

Stage 2 will be a remote work test, to be completed on your own computer, which we anticipate will take up to 4 hours of your time. Applicants will have 2 weeks to complete the test, and will be compensated with £120 in return for their work. We plan to communicate the results of stage 2 by the end of Friday 7th October.

Stage 3 will consist of one or more interviews with CLR staff. We plan to hold interviews in the week of 10th October, and aim to communicate the results of stage 3 by the end of Friday 21st October.

Stage 4: The final stage of the recruitment process will be a work trial, held in-person if possible, of between 1-10 working days depending on candidate availability. We will cover travel expenses and compensate candidates £200 per day for the work trial. We will also seek references at this stage.

We expect final recruitment decisions to be made by mid-November. If you require a faster decision than this, please feel free to contact us at the address below.

The above timelines are our aim and we fully intend to stick to them. However, we don’t firmly commit to them, and a delay of, for example, 1-2 weeks by the end of stage 3 is possible. We will communicate to candidates promptly if we expect there to be any delays. 

Enquiries

If you have any questions about the process, please contact us at hiring@longtermrisk.org. If you’d like to send an email that’s not accessible to the hiring committee, please contact tristan.cook@longtermrisk.org.

Diversity and equal opportunity employment: CLR is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our organisation. We don’t want to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, social background/class, mental or physical health or disability, or any other basis for unreasonable discrimination, whether legally protected or not. If you're considering applying to this role and would like to discuss any personal needs that might require adjustments to our application process or workplace, please feel very free to contact us.