Senior Associate, EA Funds

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) stewards the movement of people putting effective altruism principles into practice to solve the world's most pressing problems. We're working to build a flourishing future by applying evidence, reason, and compassion to challenges like global poverty, animal suffering, and existential risks.

Our work centers on growing and supporting a global community of people who rigorously analyze where they can do the most good and take action on those insights. Current strategic priorities include increasing understanding of effective altruism and its principles, growing the number of people motivated by EA principles to take significant action, and diversifying funding sources for high-impact work.

We had significant success in 2025, building momentum within CEA. Our headcount grew from 42 to 66 core staff. Program participation grew by 20–25% year over year. We merged with EA Funds and are rapidly scaling up our capacity for grantmaking and fundraising: our first Fund staffed with full-time employees (EA Animal Welfare Fund) raised almost as much as the previous three years combined.

In 2026, we're maintaining ambitious momentum while building the foundations for a step-change in the wider EA ecosystem's growth trajectory from 2027 onwards.

Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) is the grantmaking arm of CEA. Our mission is to increase the amount of funding dedicated to particularly cost-effective and impactful projects across global health & development, animal welfare, the long-term future, and EA infrastructure.

It’s a particularly exciting time to join EA Funds. EA Funds’ recent integration with CEA allows the team to benefit from shared infrastructure and opens up significant opportunities for programmatic synergies. We’ve also seen the example of EA Funds' Animal Welfare Fund scaling from ~$3M to $10M in a single year under full-time leadership with tens of millions more expected this year, and we believe other funds have similar potential.

EA Funds is trusted by thousands of donors (including through our partnership with Giving What We Can, which recommends our Animal Welfare Fund and our Long-Term Future Fund) to allocate their donations to the highest-impact opportunities. We take that trust seriously: we aim to be among the most credible, transparent, and impactful giving platforms in effective altruism.

We're hiring a Senior Associate to be a force multiplier for EA Funds' senior leadership and various grantmakers. This is a generalist role that blends executive support, donor-facing communication, grants operations, and project management.

The right person will enable senior leaders and grantmakers to focus on the highest-leverage work (strategy, grantmaking decisions, and donor relationships, etc.) by taking ownership of the operational, administrative, and communication work that keeps EA Funds running smoothly.

This role is a clear growth opportunity. You will interact closely with the director of EA Funds as well as the grantmakers of the various funds of EA Funds. This would give you context on EA grantmaking across cause areas, and get a front seat in how philanthropy leaders make decisions. This could be a launching pad for someone who wants to build toward operations leadership, program management, or a chief-of-staff-type role or other leadership roles in CEA/EA Funds or the broader EA ecosystem.

• Grant database management: Maintain the EA Funds grant database (in Airtable), ensuring records are accurate, well organized, and up to date.

• Application processing: Read, categorize, and triage incoming grant applications; flag or process various requests (e.g., no-cost extensions) in partnership with CEA’s grants team.

• Operational support for grantmaking: Fulfill various requests that arise during the grantmaking process, such as salary benchmarking, compliance checks, or gathering reference information.

• Analysis and reporting: Run ad-hoc analyses to support decisions. E.g., analysis of M&E data from grants, donor giving patterns, fund performance, or other questions from leadership.

• EA Funds inbox management: Monitor and manage the EA Funds inbox, ensuring emails are answered promptly.

• Public-facing content: Draft or support the creation of Forum posts, memos, presentations, and other materials for external audiences.

• Support donor communication and relationships (may evolve over time as we hire dedicated development professionals):

  • Draft payout reports, quarterly progress updates, and other correspondence for current and prospective donors. Ensure donor-facing communications are clear, professional, and on-brand.

  • Research donors ahead of calls, prepare talking points, and maintain a donor relationship tracker to keep engagement organized.

• Keep work on track across the team: Break vague goals into concrete steps, track ownership and deadlines across EA Funds workstreams, follow up on commitments from team meetings, surface blockers or priority conflicts early and flag when priorities need re-evaluating.

• Team productivity: Proactively identify ways to improve how the EA Funds team works: better systems, clearer processes, smarter use of tools (including AI).

• Lead or support team-wide projects: Examples include improving pieces of the grant evaluation processes, upgrading internal systems, strengthening onboarding, streamlining reporting, or building new workflows. Projects will often be in collaboration with other teams within CEA.

• Finances: Support EA Funds' financial management (e.g drafting or reconciling budgets, review transactions)

• Meeting support: Prepare briefing materials and agendas ahead of key meetings; capture and follow up on action items afterward.

• Logistics: Manage scheduling, coordinate travel or events and handle logistics

• Other tasks as assigned: In a growing team, flexibility helps!

We're less focused on specific credentials and more on how you think and work. We expect strong candidates to have most of the following:

• You take full ownership of your work: you follow through, close loops, and don't let things slip through cracks.

• You exercise good judgment about when to act independently, when to escalate, and when to push back.

• You have strong writing skills, especially for professional correspondence and donor-facing materials. You should be able to draft a thoughtful email to a major donor or a compelling payout report with minimal guidance.

• You're highly organized and energized (not drained) by managing multiple workstreams, deadlines, and competing priorities across different team members. You should be the kind of person who sees a messy situation and instinctively starts structuring it.

• You're reliable and proactive: you track commitments without being asked, surface problems early, and keep things moving.

• You’re familiar with Airtable or would pick it up in a day.

• You are a strong user of AI tools.

• You can pull together data, make sense of it, and present it clearly, whether it's grantmaking metrics, donor data, or a quick benchmarking exercise. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you should be comfortable with spreadsheets and basic quantitative reasoning.

• You’re familiar with effective altruism and genuinely motivated to support EA Funds' mission. You don't need to be a longtime EA community member, but you should understand the core ideas and be excited about them.

• You take pride in being the reason things run smoothly and you see the impact in what your work unlocks: the time you free up for grantmakers and leadership is time they spend getting funding to the projects that need it most.

• You have discretion and maturity in handling sensitive information about donors, grants, and internal strategy.

• Experience in executive support, operations, or a chief-of-staff-type role.

• Experience in nonprofit grantmaking, philanthropy, or donor relations.

• Familiarity with the EA ecosystem, key organizations, and cause areas.

• This is a full-time, remote position. The majority of the EA Funds team is currently Central European Time (CET), with some additional team members in different US timezones. Applicants should be able to have work hours between Eastern Time (ET) and CET. We have an office in Oxford, UK, that you would have access to if based there.

• Start date: August 2026.

• Reports to: Loic Watine, Director of EA Funds

• Compensation

  • US: total compensation package of $90,026, comprising a base salary of $81,842 and a 10% 401k contribution.

  • UK: total compensation package of £54,159 comprising a base salary of £49,235 and a 10% pension contribution.

  • Other locations: For candidates outside the US and UK, we base compensation on our UK salary structure and adjust for the cost of employment and fixed local benefit costs to create an equivalent package

  • Benefits in the US/UK include private health insurance, flexible work hours, a $6,000 / £5,000 annual professional development allowance, a $6,000 / £5,000 mental health support allowance, extended parental leave, ergonomic equipment, unconditional 10% pension / 401k contribution, 25 days of paid vacation, and more.

• This role will involve travel. We expect 3 to 6 trips annually to attend team retreats and other events, including several international trips.

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from self-identified women and people of colour who are excited about contributing to our mission. The Centre for Effective Altruism is an equal opportunity employer. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact [email protected].

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