The General Longtermism Team at Rethink Priorities is currently considering creating a “Longtermist Incubator” program and is accepting expression of interest submissions for a project lead/ co-lead to run the program if it’s launched.
If you’d be interested in leading a longtermist incubator as part of Rethink Priorities and fit the profile described below, we encourage you to complete this general interest application. Please click “Apply Now” to respond to the brief prompts in the application form and submit your CV.
We will keep your profile on our system, and as this is an expression of interest for an exploratory role, we will only contact you when we have general updates related to this position, or if there could be a suitable match, or as relevant opportunities arise.
Please note that we have not fully committed to a particular format for a longtermist incubator or to hiring for this program, and given this, please don’t worry if you don’t get a quick update or a response from us. In the meantime, we’d be happy to refer you to other roles within RP or at related groups, where applicable, if you have given permission for us to do so in your application form.
Application Deadline: There is currently no deadline, and we anticipate that we will be accepting expressions of interest into mid-late March. However, since the main goal of this form is to gauge interest and availability for this position, if you’re interested in applying, we’d appreciate it if you could apply by February 28 in line with our planning efforts for this project.
Contact: Please email jam@rethinkpriorities.org if you have any questions.
About the Position and the Longtermist Incubator Program
In 2022, Rethink Priorities’ General Longtermism team focused on facilitating the faster and better creation of longtermist projects (see here). In 2023, we are exploring ways to improve this process, including creating a more formalized ‘incubator’ program within the organization. Broadly, by longtermist incubator program, we mean a program that finds and matches potential founders with longtermist project ideas and provides support so they can get these projects off the ground. We have not settled on the exact model for this yet, but we anticipate that a key bottleneck will be the availability of leads/co-leads with experience running/managing incubator programs.
This lead/co-lead position would initially be a fixed-term role for 6-12 months to manage the pilot of this incubator program. Whether the program would be continued would be decided only after the pilot is completed. In case of discontinuation of the program, the contractor we hire for this experiment could potentially stay for other projects, although this is not guaranteed and whether this would be on a new fixed-term contract term or a different work arrangement would depend on the circumstances at that time. We expect this role to be full- or part-time, with a minimum time commitment of 20 hours per week. The role could be fully remote, but might require the contractor to be based in (most likely) London or Oxford for perhaps 2-8 weeks, depending on strategic decisions about the incubator pilot.
This person, if the project goes through, would work closely with and have the support of our General Longtermism and Special Projects teams. The General Longtermism team focuses on generating, prioritizing among, and doing further research on longtermist projects and interventions.
The Special Projects team is a new initiative that focuses on operations activities related to supporting these projects, such as developing budgets, writing business plans, fundraising, liaising with stakeholders, researching legal/operational issues, scouting for talent for the projects, helping run prizes or requests for proposals, and grantmaking.
What we are looking for
In order to better understand who might be available, we’d be interested in connecting with people with 2+ years experience in i) a leading role at a start-up incubator or accelerator OR ii) founding and/or leading a start-up OR iii) leading scalable independent projects.
Desired skills, experience, competencies, and knowledge:
Excellent interpersonal and team skills
Experience in scouting and recruiting founders and early employees for new organizations and projects
Experience advising/coaching start-ups or running training programs for founders
Good knowledge of one or more longtermist areas, e.g. AI governance and safety, biosecurity, or field-building.
What we Offer
Compensation
The salary for a project (co)lead is yet to be determined as Rethink Priorities has not currently committed to this project and to hiring for this position
The general range of salary we are able to offer for a full-time 12-month position, prorated for part-time work, is: $67,000 - $115,000 USD pre-tax
The exact salary would be determined based on the candidate’s prior relevant experience and corresponding title level and calculated using RP’s salary algorithm. RP does not negotiate salaries to ensure fairness.
Payments could be made in different currencies and payment intervals depending on the location of applicants and legal requirements.
Other Benefits
If this project is taken up, some of the benefits we would be able to offer a project lead/co-lead would include the following:
Opportunity to contribute to a fast-growing, high-impact organization — our research is used by key decision-makers who influence the distribution of hundreds of millions of charitable dollars
Flexible work hours and location, except for when work-related travel could be involved
Generous paid time off leave
A caring team that values respectful work relations and a healthy work-life balance
Opportunities to grow/advance your career and engage in professional development
Low administrative bureaucracy
We don’t provide snacks but we could mail you a box of Oreos if you want!
About Rethink Priorities
Founded in 2018, Rethink Priorities (RP) is a nonprofit organization that addresses global priorities—important and neglected issues—by researching solutions and strategies, mobilizing resources, and empowering our team and others. RP’s mission is to generate the most significant possible impact for others in the present and the long-term future.
Our cause areas include animal welfare, artificial intelligence, climate change, global health and development, and other work to safeguard a flourishing long-term future. RP also aims to understand and support those working on these issues.
Rethink Priorities works as all of the following:
A consultancy doing commissioned work in response to demands from organizations aligned with effective altruism (EA).
A research institute driven by research agendas we set according to our own priorities.
A think tank aiming to inform public policy to improve the world.
An accelerator, incubator, and base for priority projects.
Some of our recent accomplishments include:
Helping major foundations to answer their questions on climate change solutions, weather forecasting in lower- and middle-income countries, increasing access to medicine, and the effectiveness of prizes and other interventions.
Comparing the capacity of different animal species to experience pleasure and pain to help philanthropists decide how to allocate funding.
Investigating various animal welfare interventions, as well as bringing to light the neglected areas of invertebrate and insect welfare.
Publishing pieces on nanotechnology and ways to use forecasting to improve the long-term future, as well as supporting those interested in these types of topics.
Launching a Special Projects Team to incubate promising new initiatives, such as Epoch (a new AI research organization) and Condor Camp (EA and longtermism movement-building in Brazil and Latin America).
Conducting surveys to better understand the EA community, the general public’s familiarity with EA and their attitudes towards related issues over time as well as message testing specific issues for various EA groups.
We welcome you to review our database of published work here.
We’re supported by Open Philanthropy, Effective Altruism Funds, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and additional institutional and individual donors.
How to Apply
To apply for this role, please respond to the prompts in the application form and submit your CV. We ask that you spend no more than one hour preparing your responses.
Hey! I’d like to quietly advertise my “job post template” if I may
It contains suggestions based on talking to EAs who had high friction applying to jobs.
As an example of something I’d recommend improving in this job post: I’d have a heading for “local or remote” and “part time or full time” (or something similar), since many candidates care a lot about these aspects and it would be useful to be able to scroll and find them easily (or to use the side menu). Right now that information is “hidden” within one of the paragraphs, here’s a screen shot:
(Big fan of Rethink Priorities; Super excited about you running a longtermism incubator; Helping lead it sounds to me like a top role that I would be happy to tell about to people who might be relevant)
Thanks for the suggestions, Yonatan! The info you raised (location and employment time) is currently displayed in the summary board at the right of the screen with the goal of making it prominent to the reader (follows screenshot).
Does this appear for you? Or did you jump straight into the text and didn’t notice? If the latter, then that’s quite useful information from the user end for us to take into account and update.
Nice!
I can’t see it in the post itself. If this is behind some kind of link then I don’t know which one (and would recommend against putting the useful information behind a link, I can elaborate if you don’t agree).
(I ended up applying btw, so you can also take this as info from an applicant)
Got it, that makes sense. Thanks for the feedback!