Chief Operating Officer

Role

As COO at Ought, you help set the organization’s strategy and vision, translate that strategy into shorter-term goals while ensuring that the team is aligned to and meeting those goals, organize and maintain a hiring pipeline, interface with funders and collaborators as well as with our lawyers and accountants, and establish good processes and feedback loops within the organization.

You have significant independent decision-making capability and corresponding impact on the future of the organization.

Responsibilities

Recruiting:

• Examine how our strategy and vision should influence our hiring plans. For example, do our research engineers need to have a research background or can they just be talented engineers?
• Go to conferences and stay involved with the Effective Altruism (EA) community in order to generate leads.
• Talk to candidates in the initial stages of the pipeline, communicate what’s exciting about working at Ought, and filter out any obviously unqualified candidates. (Our expectation is that the COO will not have the technical expertise to do later stages of the interview process, but the more help you can provide in the recruiting pipeline the better.)
• Take feedback from candidates to improve the hiring process and make Ought a more desirable place to work.
• Manage the recruiting pipeline, ensuring that we are getting enough candidates in each of the different roles and that we are being responsive to candidates, while continually improving our processes to attract and close better candidates.

Instill and maintain feedback loops within the organization:

• Work with our researchers to translate the organizational mission and strategy into shorter-term concrete objectives (e.g. OKRs).
• Create, track, and share metrics, KPIs, etc., to ensure that everyone is aligned, motivated, and moving towards the correct objectives.
• Work with staff to determine their personal objectives and help everyone meet their professional development goals.
• Continually improve internal processes so that our staff can be happier and more productive.

High-level research understanding and communication:

• Work with staff to understand at a high level what we have accomplished and what our bottlenecks are, and share these learnings with external stakeholders.
• Maintain an accurate picture of the AI and AI alignment landscape, so that you can speak intelligently about how our work fits in with the work of others.
• Speak to funders and other external parties about Ought and the work we do.
• Make sure outsiders have an accurate view of what we are doing and why. If a randomly chosen EA gives a two-sentence summary of what Ought is doing, we want those two sentences to be the right ones.
• Work with our president to use your understanding of our current capabilities and bottlenecks in combination with the needs of the EA, AI, and AI alignment communities to set the organization’s mission and strategy.

Maintain and enhance organizational efficiency:

• Create and manage a budget, and work with funders to ensure that we have the resources we need.
• Run payroll, manage the office, and work with third-party accountants, lawyers, etc. to make sure that we are meeting all regulatory and other compliance requirements.
• Propose, evaluate, and implement events and activities such as internships and workshops.

About you

Requirements:

• Ability to make progress on difficult problems using evidence and reason, and to explain your thinking clearly, including mentioning gaps in your knowledge, resources you’ve leveraged, and ways to improve your process. For an example of what we are looking for, see some of the writing published by the Open Philanthropy Project, e.g. [1], [2].
• Good communicator, able to explain technical ideas to lay audiences without losing important information
• Continually building feedback loops and striving to improve your own work as well as the organization’s efficiency
• Either currently well-connected or could become well-connected in the EA community
• Interested in "getting your hands dirty" with day-to-day ops tasks
• High conscientiousness and detail-orientation

Great to have, but not required:

• Experience working in a non-profit operations role
• Experience managing teams
• Computer science or math background