About the Role
As a Program Lead for the Wildlife Technology Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, you will be responsible for scoping, designing, and — if the case holds up — launching a multi-year program, working across scientific disciplines to achieve concrete, wildlife-benefitting outcomes in a 3–5 year timespan. We are seeking to add up to three program leads to the team; program leads report to the Director, Wildlife Technology Fund.
You will operate with unusual autonomy inside a small, high-performing team. You will also be an early member of a fund that intends to launch several such programs over the coming years, so we are looking for candidates who want to help build the wider project, not only run one program within it.
Background on the Wildlife Technology Fund
The Wildlife Technology Fund looks for problems where the case for animals and the case for people point in the same direction — where interventions that would help millions or billions of animals could also protect crops, prevent diseases, avert biodiversity loss, or offer significant economic benefits. Problems with this profile are more common than people expect, and they are systematically neglected: too applied for basic-science funders, too early and unglamorous for commercial R&D, too technical for wildlife NGOs, and too obscure for governments.
This role does not come with a single predetermined problem. We have identified several potential programs, and we are equally interested in a strong candidate who arrives with their own ideas.
- Resolving the ecology of bird–window collisions. Building a welfare-focused understanding of bird-window collisions: investigating rates and degree of impact of different sub-lethal outcomes, the degree to which these mortalities affect abundance over time, and how changes in bird numbers affect the wellbeing of other animals.
- Wildlife vaccination. Developing a framework to prioritize amongst potential wildlife diseases, including consideration of downstream ecological effects, and judging whether a research program could realistically deliver an affordable vaccine.
- Vulture conservation. Investigating how vulture population recovery affects the spread of disease in both people and wildlife, weighing the potential for unexpected ecological impacts, and assessing potential interventions in terms of effectiveness and cost.
- Reducing reliance on managed pollinators. Investigating the feasibility of robotic, mechanical, or alternative pollination strategies as a method of replacing managed honeybees as commercial pollinators, or alternative strategies for improving the cost and welfare of pollination services.
- Advancing wild animal welfare indicators. Pushing the assessment of wildlife welfare forward through a coordinated push to develop indicators that work across a broad taxonomic group, can be deployed in the field at reasonable cost, and integrate welfare over a meaningful fraction of a lifespan.
- Your idea. We are interested in receiving proposals from candidates that complement this portfolio. A candidate proposal should roughly meet the following criteria:
- It plausibly affects animals at a scale of hundreds of millions or more.
- It has a real non-welfare constituency — public health, agriculture, conservation, biosecurity, or straightforward economics — who would want the result on their own terms.
- It sits in an appropriate state of technological or innovation readiness: past basic discovery, short of commercial viability, and blocked at least in part by coordination.
This position is based in Washington, D.C., with in-office work required 2–3 days per week. A relocation benefit would be considered for the right candidate.
We offer a full healthcare package and 5% 401(k) contribution. The base salary range for this role is:
- $110,000–$145,000
Role and Responsibilities
Design phase: During the first year, your overarching task is to determine whether the program should exist at all. Responsibilities include:
- Building a working knowledge and network of the people and organizations working in and adjacent to your program’s goal.
- Understanding the limitations and roadblocks impeding progress in your work area.
- Through literature review, expert interviews, comparison to pre-existing programs, and more, refining the ideas behind your program and developing an initial plan for how the program could work.
- Defining a finalized concrete program goal, timeline, and analysis of the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the concept.
- Traveling as necessary to labs, potential contractors, conferences, and more to build your knowledge of the work area and pressure test your ideas.
- Beginning to identify whether there is anyone in position to carry the innovation forward, so that research translates into impact for animals.
Program management phase: Subject to funding availability and directorial approval, if your research in the first year establishes that a program concept is worth turning into reality, the position can extend to up to 5 years and you take over leadership of the newly launched program. Responsibilities in this phase include:
- Setting direction and making the call on which approaches advance and which get cut between program phases.
- Managing a portfolio of grants, contracts, and commissioned research, and redeploying money quickly when the evidence changes.
- Running the performer community — workshops, cross-team problem-solving, and the coordination that keeps parallel efforts from siloing.
- Sustaining the funding base and reporting credibly to donors.
- Building and mentoring a small team.
- Executing the handoff: commercial partners, regulators, or follow-on funders who carry the work past the program’s horizon.
Key Qualifications
- Sufficient scientific expertise to understand the problem you’re working on, identify new connections and possible solutions, and establish credibility with potential grantees and funders. Domain expertise or formal qualifications in any of the specific areas above are welcome but not required.
- Talented builder of networks. You can create connections between people, ideas, and institutions that did not previously exist, across academia, industry, government, and philanthropy.
- Strong written and verbal communication. You can clearly communicate your goals and ideas across philanthropic and scientific audiences, delivering things like pitch decks, program instructions, or progress reports.
- Comfort with money and hard decisions. You will make funding decisions with incomplete information and terminate work that people you like are attached to.
- Highly curious and skeptical. You ask questions no one else is asking, you’re willing to question what everyone in the field agrees on, you’re willing to explore an idea that sounds improbable at first, you notice systematic biases.
- Extremely autonomous and highly productive. You don’t wait to be told; you see a gap and fill it. You work faster than most people you know.
- Strongly committed to wild animal welfare, and demonstrably familiar with differences between wild animal welfare science and adjacent fields like conservation or population management.
- Willing to travel frequently to visit performers, attend conferences, etc.
- Familiarity with cost-effectiveness analyses and counterfactual reasoning is preferred.
This Role Is Probably Not for You If…
- You want to do the research yourself. This job is designing programs and stewarding science performed by others.
- You need a stable scope of responsibility. The problem and program will develop extensively through the design phase.
- You are uncomfortable concluding in public that a promising idea does not work.
- You would find it demoralizing to spend a year on a program that doesn’t get approved.
- You want a role that is guaranteed to continue. This role is funding dependent beyond year 1, and even fully funded and launched programs are limited to 5-year durations.
Outcomes
If you are successful in this role, in three years’ time, you will have:
- Defined and designed a program, pivoting to other ideas if necessary.
- Successfully pitched, been approved, and fundraised for a high-impact research program.
- Identified a clear theory of change and partners to ensure your program translates from research to impact.
- Funded an initial set of research projects toward your goal.
Values
You will thrive within our team, if you:
- Have strong mission and vision alignment: You believe in the power of science, innovation, and technology to create a brighter future for all.
- Exhibit high agency: You can move mountains and break perceived constraints.
- Inspire others and are highly collaborative: You can motivate others to join your mission and goals. You understand the value of going further by working with others.
- Value exceptional talent and the power of networks: You can spot or nurture exceptional talent and believe in the value of building networks and the power law of talent.
- Are comfortable working in fast-moving and ambitious teams: You are not afraid of ambiguity and enjoy working at pace.
