Open Phil’s GCR team is growing – and we’re hiring several Chiefs of Staff

By George Rosenfeld, maura @ 2025-11-18T05:22 (+30)

Open Phil’s Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) team is growing quickly. This year, we expect to make well over $500M in grants across our AI and biosecurity work (that’s more than a 60% increase over 2024) and we’re hoping to expand that significantly over the months and years to come. 

We’re currently hiring several Chief of Staff roles for different parts of our GCR team, each of which we think could substantially boost some of our top priority projects. 

Specifically, we’re hiring: 

• A Chief of Staff for our GCR leadership team, working with Emily and George to oversee the full GCR portfolio, identify and execute on the next large areas of AI safety grantmaking that should exist at OP, and develop a forward-looking strategy as we continue to scale.
• A Chief of Staff for a new short AI timelines special projects team, working with Claire to identify and spin up high-priority projects which would be particularly valuable under short AI timelines.
• A Chief of Staff for our Technical AI Safety team, working with Peter to further expand our rapidly-growing technical research program (which has already 3x’ed to ~$150M in grants over the past year).
• An Associate Program Officer^[1] on our AI Governance and Policy team, working with Alex on topics like information security, model evaluations and frontier AI safety frameworks. 

Note that technical expertise is not required for any of these roles (though it may be beneficial) – we’re looking for talented generalists, not subject-matter experts. 

There’s more detail on each of these roles here – the deadline for applying is this Sunday 23rd Nov. 

Why these roles? 

As our GCR team and its grantmaking have grown, leadership capacity has become an increasingly important bottleneck, and therefore a particularly leveraged intervention point for growing the team’s impact. In our experience, Chief of Staff roles have been a very effective way to significantly expand that capacity and therefore the impact of the team – and it also has the side-effect of training up talented generalists who can take on more responsibility over time. These roles have been valuable at OP in the past, and we want to double down on them going forward. 

For what it’s worth, we suspect that the case for these roles isn’t limited to our own context and that other grantees and orgs in our ecosystem could benefit from similar roles as they scale. The general principle is that it’s often a good idea for senior leaders to pair up with a strong generalist who can work alongside them and then invest significantly in giving that person a lot of context. Anecdotally, two of our GCR team leads (Andrew and Luke) both think it was a costly mistake not to hire for this role earlier. 

We think that this type of role can add value in several ways:

• Strategic advice: a Chief of Staff usually serves as a very close thought partner for their principal (i.e. the team lead they work with). This can help in a few ways: first, they often give good advice, especially since they often have more context on their principal’s work than literally anyone else. Second, even when the decisions don’t change, having a trusted thought partner can allow a principal to move more quickly, knowing that the Chief of Staff will likely catch mistakes or flag issues they might miss.
• Frictionless delegation: a Chief of Staff often sees ~everything their principal is working on and has full visibility of their priorities, which makes delegating tasks to them very low friction compared to other types of report. This often increases in scope over time: a principal will sometimes start by delegating low-stakes tasks, but as the Chief of Staff builds trust and context (sometimes very quickly) they can take on larger projects and responsibilities that would otherwise stay on the principal's plate or just not happen.
• Expanding the principal’s reach: A great Chief of Staff can quickly build trust with the principal and wider organization, and context on the principal’s priorities and approach to decision-making. Once they have enough of each, they can often represent the principal across a wide range of contexts so that together the duo can cover more ground.
• Learning from experience: The role of a Chief of Staff can be a really good training ground for learning leadership skills, building relationships, and earning trust. Chiefs of Staff are often natural candidates to step into leadership roles, which is valuable for most orgs and is a big part of why we’re excited about these hires. 

What does a Chief of Staff actually do?

The title can mean different things in different contexts, ranging from superpowered executive assistant to independent executive leader. Even within OP, there’s variation in the responsibilities which people in this role take on, depending on the specific needs of the principal and team and the strengths of the relevant person. 

That said, we expect the roles in this hiring round to follow a broadly similar set of responsibilities (which predictably overlaps with the sources of value-add above):

• Thought partnership. Serve as a trusted advisor, providing valuable input and feedback on team strategy or major decision.
• Special projects. Own priority projects which fall under the 'office' of the relevant principal and would otherwise move more slowly or stay on the principal's plate - especially those which benefit from close coordination with or trust from the principal.
• Stakeholder management. Build high-trust relationships across the organization and throughout the ecosystems we work in to represent the relevant principal where appropriate and take on more responsibility over time. Somewhat relatedly, several Chief of Staff roles at OP have also involved taking on personnel management responsibilities over time.
• Force multiplier. Look for ways to help the principal move faster, taking things off their plate and working with them to stay focused on the most valuable goals.

More about the individual roles is in the JD here.

Apply to OP! 

As you can tell, we think these roles are likely to be really impactful: our GCR team hopes to increase our giving and our impact significantly in the coming years so that we can be more ambitious in our mission to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic risks from powerful AI and biological threats. 

As discussed, Chief of Staff roles can be opaque and it’s sometimes difficult to get a sense of what makes these roles high-impact, who’s good at them, and how they fit into a larger career path – this post is one effort to help with that. In part because of this, we suspect some people who would be great Chiefs of Staff haven’t thought much about this type of role before. If you’ve got generalist skills (like strong organization, agency, communication, and overall judgement) and you’ve never thought about Chief of Staff as a role before, it might be worth considering!

By stepping into one of these roles, you would be joining a well-resourced team working on crucial problems, at a moment in our growth when additional strategic and operational capacity can meaningfully change what we’re able to achieve. If you could be interested, we’d suggest erring on the side of applying here by EOD Sunday 23rd Nov.

1. ^{^}

    (Though different in title, this role has enough similarities with other roles in terms of likely duties and impact case that we’re including it in the same round.)