80,000 Hours is hiring for an Engagement Specialist

By Bella, 80000_Hours @ 2025-04-25T10:33 (+8)

This is a crosspost of a job listing. I'm the hiring manager, so please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments, or anonymously here & I'll answer in the comments.

Summary

We're looking for a new Engagement Specialist to help us increase engagement among our target audience, by managing our outreach channels, contributing to our growth strategy, and helping to deploy our yearly budget of ~$3m.

Location: London, UK (preferred). We're open to remote candidates and can support UK visa applications.

Salary: Varies depending on fit, location, and experience. An applicant in London with good fit and no relevant experience would be paid approx. £60,000; an applicant in London with excellent fit and 4 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £82,000.

To apply, please complete this application form by 11th May 2025.

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems, especially mitigating risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

Since we started investing much more in growth in 2022, we've increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6.5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, it seems like there's considerable room to reach more people — and there are many exciting growth projects we're unable to take on because of low capacity on our team. So, we're looking for a new Engagement Specialist to help us ambitiously increase the amount of engagement with our advice and our impact.

We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us massively increase our readership, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next couple of years you might have:

We think this role seems very impactful if you're excited about 80,000 Hours' theory of change.

The main reason is that 80,000 Hours has a very strong track record of helping people find high-impact careers. This role lets you be a multiplier on the impact of 80,000 Hours as a whole, by finding larger and more relevant audiences who might be interested in the advice. We think this makes the role highly leveraged.

Since we are a nonprofit and we aren't selling a product, this is a fairly nontraditional role. We'd therefore encourage you to apply, even if you aren't otherwise looking for roles in growth, outreach, or marketing, and don't have prior relevant experience.

Learn more about 80k's new focus on AGI

Responsibilities

We're looking for a flexible Engagement Specialist, who will take on responsibilities such as:

Note that this role will not primarily involve writing for the website (though you might write and publish some especially growth-relevant pages). If you're most interested in that, you should apply for our writer-researcher position instead.

About you

We're looking for someone who has the following traits:

Ideally, you'd also have the following traits — but we encourage you to apply even if they don't describe you!

Role details

The new Engagement Specialist would be managed by our current Director of Growth, Bella Forristal. Our existing team focused on growing our reach and engagement consists of just Bella Forristal (the current head) and Nik Mastroddi.

This is a full-time role, but staff can work flexible hours — i.e. whatever schedule (consistent with full-time status) will allow them to be most personally effective.

We would prefer for you to work in-person — either based in London or able to regularly visit (we can support UK visa applications if needed). However, we are open to remote applications.

The salary will vary depending on your fit, location, and experience; however, to give a rough sense, an applicant in London with good fit and no relevant experience would be paid approx. £60,000. An applicant in London with excellent fit and 4 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £82,000.

Our benefits include:

We have a really awesome team and are excited for more people to join us in our mission to help people use their careers to solve the world's most pressing problems.

Evaluation process

To apply, please fill in this form. If you have any problems submitting the form, please send your CV to bella@80000hours.org.

Our evaluation process will vary a bit depending on the candidate, but is likely to include a written work sample, an interview, and a multi-day in-person trial. We offer payment for work samples and trials, conditional on your location and right to work in the UK.

We're aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people's willingness to put themselves forward for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We'd especially like to encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to express their interest.

If you're feeling unsure whether you meet our criteria, I'd like to strongly encourage you to express interest; or reach out to bella@80000hours.org if you're still unsure.

Apply here


David_Moss @ 2025-04-25T10:49 (+4)

We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

 

Just to note that the even more recent EA Survey is here, and 80K are indeed still the single source most commonly cited as important for people getting involved!

Bella @ 2025-04-25T10:55 (+2)

Ah — thanks so much David for adding the more recent link!! I'll add that into the job ad on our site too :)

Bella @ 2025-04-28T08:58 (+3)

I got another anonymous question! :)

In the post about 80K’s pivot to AGI, you discuss active headhunting for specific roles relevant to AGI. To what extent do you expect a candidate in this role (and 80K’s outreach more broadly) to focus on your historic audience (ambitious, altruistic young people) vs active outreach to those with relevant skills for making AGI go well (e.g. ML professionals, lawyers)?

The kind-of-annoying but true answer is "some of both!"

I expect that a reasonably high proportion of our new outreach efforts will be focused on trying to find people who are particularly well-suited to contributing to making AGI go well. But:

I also put quite a lot of weight on the argument that 80k as a product has been historically really valuable to a certain kind of person; we have hypotheses about how / why, but ultimately, making big changes we should expect to see some regression to the mean. So I'm keen for us to not entirely stop using our previous strategy.

But if e.g. the website changes so much that it doesn't make sense to reach people without a prior interest in AI, then that might change (tho, FWIW, I think this is pretty unlikely, at least in the near future / without the web team's views changing).

Bella @ 2025-05-01T08:05 (+2)

More anonymous questions!

How much weight is given to location? It seems that UK/US-based organisations within EA often claim to be open to remote candidates around the world but seldom actually make offers to these candidates (at least from what I’ve seen/heard over the years)

I think I'd give quite a bit of weight against a candidate if they never had the ability to visit the office. But I think if someone lived overseas but e.g. could spend a couple of weeks here every 3-6 months, it's not a big downside.

I'm not sure which organisations specifically you're talking about, but speaking about 80k here:

If a remote candidate did make it to the trial round, would it be a remote or in-person trial?

In-person. We can pay for (and book, if you like) flights and accommodation. We unfortunately can't pay for your time, unless you have the right to work in the UK (but if you do, we'll pay for your time as well!)

How much quantitative work is involved in this role – e.g. calculating cost-effectiveness, etc?

A fair amount!

I'd say the person in this role needs to have the quantitative skills to answer moderately complex data-related questions, but they do not need to have a quantitative degree (though that could be helpful). I think "was reasonably good at high school maths," plus the willingness to learn a few key concepts (such as cost-effectiveness, and diminishing marginal returns) would be sufficient :)

The application form contains a quantitative question for this reason. I think if you get this question right without too much trouble, you'll be fine :)

Bella @ 2025-04-25T13:05 (+2)

I got the following anonymous question:

Heya Bella! When is the preferred start date for engagement specialist role? And, how late a start would you be willing to accept?

The preferred start date is basically as soon as possible after we conclude the evaluation process!

But, we understand folks will have notice periods, and other obligations that might mean they need to wait a while.

I think needing to wait e.g. several months is a (significant-ish) downside, but we'd be willing to do so for the right applicant!