BERI is Hiring: My Experience as Deputy Director and Why You Should Apply

By elizabethcooper @ 2024-10-17T11:59 (+23)

This post will provide prospective applicants with an overview of what my time as BERI’s Deputy Director has been like and what I’ve loved about working at BERI.

BERI is the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.

Background 

This is BERI's second "core" hire in the past 5 years. While we have numerous other employees and contractors, they are all embedded at various research groups that we support and do not play a role in running BERI as an organization. 

This opportunity is likely a good fit for someone who is early- to mid-career with experience and interest in operations, strategy, and relationship building. While we spent a lot of time on the job description, this role can be somewhat tailored to a new hire’s strengths and preferences. 

Other Notes

• Applications are due by November 17th
• I’ll be at EAG Boston, so feel free to connect with me on Swapcard if you’d like to chat more about this role or anything else related to BERI or x-risk
• We are offering a $2,000 referral award to anyone who refers a candidate that we ultimately end up hiring
  • You can email referrals to contact@existence.org
• Please have a low bar for applying to this role!
• If you’re unfamiliar with our work, I’d recommend the following resources:
  • 2023 Annual Report
  • 2024 Collaborator Survey
  • Our Info page (our new website is still under development!) 

What I Actually Do as Deputy Director

We obsessively track our time at BERI, so I looked at how my time has been spent over the past 12 months (I’ve worked as DD for 18 months now). Below is a summary of my time allocations,  as well as my initial  thoughts about how this might be similar or different for a new DD.

• 35% - Direct support of our university collaborations
  • This includes check-in calls, running hiring rounds, processing payments and reimbursements, purchasing, and more.
  • I would expect this number to be between 30% and 40% for a new DD.
• 23% - General management and admin
  • This includes meetings with our ED (we have ~daily check-ins), strategic planning, preparing for board meetings, project management, etc.
  • I would expect this number to be much higher for the first six months for a new DD given that most onboarding will fall into this category, but would expect this to stay ~25% longer-term.
• 15% - Finance
  • This includes credit card approvals, budgeting, runway calculations, annual audit preparation, etc.
  • I came into this role with a strong finance and accounting background and thus took on much more accounting responsibility than originally anticipated. I expect this number could range from 5% to 20% for a new DD depending on their background.
• 8% - External Communications
  • This includes writing our annual report, blog posts, Forum posts, website maintenance, etc.
  • I was surprised to see this number this high, but writing is something that we take seriously at BERI (even a short blog post will often go through 3-4 rounds of editing before posting), so this number actually does make sense.
  • I would expect a new DD to spend 5-10% of their time on external communications.
• 5% - Professional Development
  • This includes time spent reading newsletters, attending conferences and seminars, and other upskilling activities.
  • I would expect this to be ~10% for a new DD’s first year, especially if  they are new to x-risk and/or accounting.
• 14% - Everything else
  • This includes HR, fundraising, special projects, travel, and more.

Things I Love About This Role and BERI

• Every week is different.
  • I would say work at BERI is split 50/50 between the planned and unplanned
    • 50% of our time is spent working towards known deadlines (such as fundraising proposals, monthly accounting processes, board meetings, etc.)
    • 50% of our time is spent either responding to new requests from collaborators, developing new ideas, or working through the “we should do this one day” tasks and projects that accumulate over time
  • As seen from the time allocations above, this role covers a very broad range of tasks and responsibilities
    • It’s very rare that I spend more than half a day working on a single project
    • I’ve had 80 different time entries over the past two weeks, ranging in duration from 1 minute to 2.5 hours
  • I’ve personally loved this variability and thrive in this kind of work environment
• We genuinely work with some of the best people
  • I think this is my favorite thing about working at BERI
  • I am constantly amazed at the caliber of people that we work with, and have been genuinely inspired by so many of them
  • Everyone (like, literally everyone) we work with is just so…nice
• Ultimately our work centers around helping people
  • I like to describe BERI as being a catalyst
  • It’s a truly great feeling to be able to tell someone “yes, we can do that”
  • We have numerous examples of projects that wouldn’t have happened without BERI’s support

Tl;dr: Working as DD at BERI has been a joy for myriad reasons, and I’m so excited to find a new DD who can help me carry this work forward.