About the Role
Fundamentally, the goal of the Chief of Staff role is to enable the organization to do more, more quickly. They’ll work with the CEO on core projects that are bottlenecking our impact, especially highly operational ones. The role will necessarily change over time — frequently, the Chief of Staff might stand up a new function or area and then hand it off to a new hire. The position is a generalist role working to enable the organization wherever it is bottlenecked.
Upon starting, the Chief of Staff will have three core projects:
- Hiring: You’ll own our recruiting function end-to-end: writing and placing role descriptions, sourcing, running the pipeline, designing work trials, and screening candidates, in coordination with other staff.
- Events: We run roughly 4–6 small academic workshops, one 50-person conference, and two staff retreats per year. These are a core part of how we advance our coordinated research programs. You’ll be accountable for them running well, working with our operations associate on delivery.
- Scaling our operating model: We have an unusual operating model, which relies on staff members acting with a high degree of autonomy. This is easy to maintain for our current program and small staff size, but this will become more challenging as we grow in headcount and scope. You’ll work with the CEO and operations associate to ensure that our processes are scalable, new staff are onboarded to our culture successfully, and that we’re generally thoughtful about growth.
Around a quarter of your time will likely be spent on projects that aren’t on this list: finding bottlenecks and removing them, building operational infrastructure, improving how we use AI internally, drafting funder and public-facing material, and other projects that surface and might otherwise sit with the CEO.
You’ll manage our operations associate, and we also expect to hire an executive assistant during your first year. Over time we anticipate this becoming a small operations function reporting to you (or to someone else that you hire). You’ll report directly to the CEO and work most closely with them.
While you’ll be the primary thought partner to the CEO on strategy, your work will often involve implementing strategic projects. This role is primarily executional in nature, not strategic. You’ll spend a lot of your time on unglamorous, concrete work, like chasing candidates, booking venues, writing onboarding docs, or fixing things that are broken.
About You
We’re open to many backgrounds for this position. We expect the strongest candidates will come from operations roles at small, fast-moving organizations, from management consulting, or from academic environments that have involved a large degree of project management.
The ideal candidate has the following characteristics:
- A strong interest in the more neglected corners of animal welfare. Our work primarily focuses on invertebrates. Our closest intellectual neighbors are groups working on wild animal welfare and related challenges. While you don’t need a research background, you should find these questions compelling. You’ll need to deeply understand why we’ve chosen the questions we work on.
- A track record of owning things end to end. The ideal candidate will have autonomously run projects from ideation to delivery in the real world. You should have a track record of ownership and project management.
- High agency and genuine ambition. This role will often receive minimal management and supervision. You’ll frequently be the only person who knows a thing needs doing, and you’ll need to do it without being asked. As an organization, we have extremely high ambition — we’re looking for candidates whose ambition matches ours.
- Comfort with a scope that isn’t fully defined, and that will change. This role will look different in 6 months than it does on your first day. The ideal candidate feels comfortable with the degree of change this role will have, and is excited to be in a dynamic, poorly defined position.
- Strong writing. You’ll need to produce internal and external written materials that are clear and compelling. The ideal candidate is a strong written communicator.
- Experience producing events, or clear evidence you could. The Chief of Staff will likely start out deeply involved in our events function, and the ideal candidate has the project management experience to help this go well.
- Willingness to tell us we’re wrong. The ideal candidate is very comfortable with disagreement, and voicing concerns early.
- Comfort managing a junior colleague well. While this role doesn’t have significant management responsibilities, it will regularly involve some management. Experience in management or leadership is a plus.
Finding someone with all of these traits is ideal, but we will consider all candidates with relevant backgrounds. If you think you might be a good fit but don’t have all our ideal characteristics, we encourage you to apply regardless.
