Senior Associate, EA Funds

About this role

ABOUT CEA

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) stewards the movement of people putting effective altruism principles into practice to solve the world's most pressing problems. We're working to build a flourishing future by applying evidence, reason, and compassion to challenges like global poverty, animal suffering, and existential risks.

Our work centers on growing and supporting a global community of people who rigorously analyze where they can do the most good and take action on those insights. Current strategic priorities include increasing understanding of effective altruism and its principles, growing the number of people motivated by EA principles to take significant action, and diversifying funding sources for high-impact work.

We had significant success in 2025, building momentum within CEA. Our headcount grew from 42 to 66 core staff. Program participation grew by 20–25% year over year. We merged https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BLvTcMMEQGFYsh6Jw/ea-funds-and-cea-are-merging with EA Funds https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/ and are rapidly scaling up our capacity for grantmaking and fundraising: our first Fund staffed with full-time employees (EA Animal Welfare Fund https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare) raised almost as much as the previous three years combined.

In 2026, we're maintaining ambitious momentum https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Dy4iGHbAkKAQ4t2Dw/building-sustainable-momentum-progress-report-on-cea-s-2025 while building the foundations for a step-change in the wider EA ecosystem's growth trajectory from 2027 onwards.

ABOUT EA FUNDS

Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) is the grantmaking arm of CEA. Our mission is to increase the amount of funding dedicated to particularly cost-effective and impactful projects across global health & development, animal welfare, the long-term future, and EA infrastructure.

It’s a particularly exciting time to join EA Funds. EA Funds’ recent integration with CEA allows the team to benefit from shared infrastructure and opens up significant opportunities for programmatic synergies. We’ve also seen the example of EA Funds' Animal Welfare Fund scaling from ~$3M to $10M in a single year under full-time leadership with tens of millions more expected this year, and we believe other funds have similar potential.

EA Funds is trusted by thousands of donors (including through our partnership with Giving What We Can, which recommends https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-2026 our Animal Welfare Fund and our Long-Term Future Fund) to allocate their donations to the highest-impact opportunities. We take that trust seriously: we aim to be among the most credible, transparent, and impactful giving platforms in effective altruism.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a Senior Associate to be a force multiplier for EA Funds' senior leadership and various grantmakers. This is a generalist role that blends executive support, donor-facing communication, grants operations, and project management.

The right person will enable senior leaders and grantmakers to focus on the highest-leverage work (strategy, grantmaking decisions, and donor relationships, etc.) by taking ownership of the operational, administrative, and communication work that keeps EA Funds running smoothly.

This role is a clear growth opportunity. You will interact closely with the director of EA Funds as well as the grantmakers of the various funds of EA Funds. This would give you context on EA grantmaking across cause areas, and get a front seat in how philanthropy leaders make decisions. This could be a launching pad for someone who wants to build toward operations leadership, program management, or a chief-of-staff-type role or other leadership roles in CEA/EA Funds or the broader EA ecosystem.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

GRANTS OPERATIONS (~45%)

- Grant database management: Maintain the EA Funds grant database (in Airtable), ensuring records are accurate, well organized, and up to date.

- Application processing: Read, categorize, and triage incoming grant applications; flag or process various requests (e.g., no-cost extensions) in partnership with CEA’s grants team.

- Operational support for grantmaking: Fulfill various requests that arise during the grantmaking process, such as salary benchmarking, compliance checks, or gathering reference information.

- Analysis and reporting: Run ad-hoc analyses to support decisions. E.g., analysis of M&E data from grants, donor giving patterns, fund performance, or other questions from leadership.

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS (~20%)

- EA Funds inbox management: Monitor and manage the EA Funds inbox, ensuring emails are answered promptly.

- Public-facing content: Draft or support the creation of Forum posts, memos, presentations, and other materials for external audiences.

- Support donor communication and relationships (may evolve over time as we hire dedicated development professionals): - Draft payout reports, quarterly progress updates, and other correspondence for current and prospective donors. Ensure donor-facing communications are clear, professional, and on-brand. - Research donors ahead of calls, prepare talking points, and maintain a donor relationship tracker to keep engagement organized.

TEAM-LEVEL PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND PROBLEM-SOLVING (~15%)

- Keep work on track across the team: Break vague goals into concrete steps, track ownership and deadlines across EA Funds workstreams, follow up on commitments from team meetings, surface blockers or priority conflicts early and flag when priorities need re-evaluating.

- Team productivity: Proactively identify ways to improve how the EA Funds team works: better systems, clearer processes, smarter use of tools (including AI).

- Lead or support team-wide projects: Examples include improving pieces of the grant evaluation processes, upgrading internal systems, strengthening onboarding, streamlining r

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