Expression of Interest, Chief of Staff

80,000 Hours helps talented people work on the world’s most pressing problems, especially mitigating risks from advanced AI. Millions of people engage with our content each year, and thousands have changed their careers because of our work. We’re looking for a chief of staff who can help us build a best-in-class operations function: one that sets the bar for what operations looks like at a high-impact organisation.

The operations team makes sure 80,000 Hours has the resources it needs — financial runway, a thriving team, excellent workspaces, and strong systems — and that those resources are deployed effectively, acting as a multiplier on the rest of the organisation. We run HR, recruiting, finance, governance, legal, our office, events, and our tech and security systems. We have 15 staff across four sub-teams (People Ops, Recruiting, Business Ops, and Finance and Governance Ops) and plan to grow to more than 20 in 2026.

In this role, you’d be:

• A thought partner to the DoO — helping the DoO plan and prioritise their work and acting as a trusted sounding board on team, people, and strategy questions.
• Leading on ops team culture and cohesion — organising socials and strategy sessions; facilitating a strong feedback culture; supporting team morale; and surfacing team-wide issues with views on how to address them.
• Owning the ops team’s infrastructure — for example, running our quarterly and annual planning, owning our team-wide task management systems, and designing the processes that hold a fast-growing team together.
• Leading high-stakes special projects — picking up work that doesn’t fit cleanly into another sub-team. Examples include running a staff AI learning initiative, drafting an expression of interest for a senior hire, or leading on a team vision push.
• Taking on team lead work on the DoO’s behalf — for example, contributions to organisation-wide coordination and planning or drafting strategy documents or team comms.

We would expect strong performers to take on more independent ownership over time — such as leading on strategy work, hiring, or picking up a specialist domain. The person in this role could one day be a successor for the director of operations role itself. The team is currently led by Sash as acting director of operations while Brenton (COO) takes time to consider a role change. The chief of staff would report to whichever of us is leading the team long-term.

Who we’re looking for

We expect strong candidates will have prior experience, and involvement with the effective altruism / AI safety community is a plus. You might have:

• Run or helped to run an operations team yourself.
• Supported a senior leader as a chief of staff or in a similar role.
• Worked at an EA or AI safety-focused organisation (in an operations or non-operations role).
• Worked in consulting, project management, or another role requiring strong analytical skills and stakeholder management.

We’re looking for someone who’s especially strong on:

• Judgment and reasoning. You can take a thorny, half-formed issue and move the conversation forward — proposing framings, surfacing the real disagreement, or pushing the group to a decision. You weigh competing considerations well and land on sensible answers under uncertainty.
• Reliability. You follow through on what you say you’ll do, you don’t drop balls, and your work is consistently high-quality.
• Project management. You can run complex, poorly scoped, multi-stakeholder work end-to-end.
• Communication. Your work is cognitively easy to engage with: you highlight key points, state your bottom line clearly, and structure things so others can follow your reasoning without effort.
• Collaboration. You manage key stakeholders well, engage substantively with critical feedback, and build strong working relationships.
• Being a force multiplier. You get satisfaction from supporting the team lead and enabling the operations team’s success.

Logistics, salary, and benefits

This is a full-time role based in London, or remote with at least four hours of daily overlap with 9:00 AM–6:00 PM UK time. We can sponsor UK visas in most cases. The salary will vary based on skills and experience, but to give a rough sense, we expect starting salaries to be between £93,000–121,000 for candidates in London, £81,000–105,000 for remote candidates outside of the US, and $116,000–170,000 for candidates in the US.

Our benefits include:

• 25 days of paid holiday, plus public holidays
• Private medical insurance
• Long-term disability insurance
• Pension scheme / retirement plan with employer contributions
• Up to 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave and childcare allowance for children under five
• £5,000 annual self-development budget
• The option to use 10% of your time for self-development
• Gym, shower facilities, and unlimited free food provided at our London office

This announcement is an expression of interest, rather than a formal hiring round. Because of this, we have a high bar for considering enquiries, and won’t be able to respond to everyone who reaches out. If you don’t hear back from us, you should feel very welcome to apply to future 80,000 Hours positions.

The application process will vary depending on the candidate, but is likely to include 1–3 written work tests, an interview, and an in-person multi-day assessment. We offer payment for work tests and multi-day assessments, conditional on your location and visa status.

We’re aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes, and would especially like to encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply, even if you don’t meet all the suggested criteria.

Referrals

Know someone perfect for this role? If you refer them and we end up hiring them, we’ll send you a thank-you of up to £750 (or $1,000). See our referral guide for how it works.