Project Coordinator
About CEA
The Centre for Effective Altruism’s mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.
About this role
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is seeking a Project Coordinator to help organize our growing online team.
CEA's online team manages some of the most visible projects in EA, from the EA newsletter with its 60,000 subscribers, to the Forum and its thousands of regular readers, to the virtual programs through which some 500 people are passing at any given time.
Recent surveys have indicated that our work has been influential in getting people involved in EA, and both we and our funders are excited about scaling up our existing products.
We have also been growing rapidly. Over the past eight months we have doubled our staff, doubled hours of engagement on the Forum, and tripled virtual program enrollment.
Some key challenges are now:
- Hiring excellent engineers, designers, and writers to sustain that growth
- Finding users to interview each week, so that we can react quickly to user feedback
- Saving the time of engineers and writers, who sometimes get pulled into answering support requests and scheduling
In this role, you would be the "nerve centre" of the online team, addressing these key bottlenecks.
Your regular tasks might involve:
- Project management for the online team, including
- Coordinating our monthly goal-setting process
- Writing up our monthly impact summary
- Overseeing recruitment
- Handling support requests from Forum users
- Answering questions about how to use the Forum
- Passing on bug reports to the development team
- Performing some moderation tasks like flagging spam
- Coordinating hiring processes (e.g. scheduling interviews)
- Organizing the logistics of team retreats and design sprints
- Setting up weekly interviews with our users so that we can get feedback on our projects
Additionally you’ll work closely with Ben West (Head of Online) and other team members to address any new challenges we face like:
- Analyzing whether virtual program attendees have gone on to attend EAG or otherwise deepen their involvement, to give us a sense of how impactful VP is
- Sourcing testimonials for effectivealtruism.org
- Helping to improve our systems for EA Virtual Programs
- Building dashboards to track our programs’ impact
Who is suited to this role?
The ideal candidate will be:
- Ruthlessly organized: We’re looking for someone who is conscientious and detail-oriented, and who has the ability to juggle multiple projects with competing deadlines and priorities.
- Enthusiastic to take on a support role: You are energized by acting as a force multiplier, and are willing to take on some repetitive and unglamorous tasks to make that happen.
- Mission-driven: Our ideal candidate is passionate about the goals of CEA and its constituent organizations. Read about CEA’s goals here.
- Flexible: You have a flexible workstyle, are able to adapt to different preferences, willing to try out new things and juggle a diverse set of tasks at once.
- Highly engaged with the EA community
- Available 5-7pm GMT during weekdays.
We expect that the ideal candidate will have 1-3 years of relevant experience, but are open to people with more or less. People with a wide variety of backgrounds have performed well in this type of role before, so we’re open to considering people with no work experience, no formal education, etc. If this position description appeals to you, we encourage you to apply regardless of work history.
Role Progression
Because this position will involve working closely with engineers, product managers, designers, and content creators, you will get a high level understanding of many of the skills required to build a digital product. This could be good preparation for anyone who wishes to pursue one of these careers, or a career in general management or entrepreneurship, or operations at a tech startup. (You will also be managed by Ben, who is the cofounder of a successful tech startup.)
The online team expects to about double our staff count this year, and with that growth will come many opportunities for you to take on additional responsibility. We expect that this will look like more fully owning the projects related to your tasks, e.g. taking all the strategic decisions regarding user testing for all of the online team’s projects. We expect to substantially shape this growth around your goals and abilities.
Salary, Benefits, and Location
This is a full-time remote position, reporting directly to Ben West (Head of Online). You are free to work out of CEA's Oxford office if you are ever in the area. We prefer applicants who are able to work in time zones between US Pacific Time and GMT.
Your starting salary range is £70,800.00-£99,600.00 (Assuming you are based in Oxford) or $134,000-$191,000 (assuming you are based in San Francisco), or $109,200-$155,700 (assuming you are based in Detroit), depending on prior experience and location. There may be flexibility in salary for exceptional candidates with significant experience. You can find out more about our approach to compensation here.
Benefits include health, dental, and vision insurance, flexible work hours, a £5,000 annual professional development allowance, a £5,000 mental health support allowance, extended parental leave, ergonomic equipment, 3% pension contribution, 25 days of paid vacation, and more. (Benefits are similar in the US and the UK.)
Application Process
We will consider applications as we receive them. We are ideally looking for someone able to start in March-April 2022.
After considering your written application, we may invite you to complete a short trial task followed by further interviews. We will invite finalists to provide references and participate in a multi-day paid work trial.
We are happy to consider applicants from overseas and may consider sponsorship if needed. CEA serves a global community, and our team works with people and organizations all over the world. We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, and we encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from women, gender minorities, and people of color who are excited about contributing to our mission. We are an equal opportunity employer.
If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact Caitlin@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
Tour of Service
CEA offers this position both as a normal, full-time position and as a 1-2 year Tour of Service, based on your preference.
The 1-2 year time commitment and project-based goals are informal – legally, you will be hired as a normal employee. They exist to signal that we think you could have a large impact here, but understand that your highest-impact opportunities may be elsewhere in two years’ time. We hope that you will stay at CEA after your Tour, but we’d still be happy for you if you found an impactful position elsewhere.
You can find more information about this model in this article, or at the US Digital Service, which has found success with the model and partially inspired our use of it.
This position is now closed.