Research Fellow / Research Officer / Senior Researcher / Research Director (GCR)

Coefficient Giving’s Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) division — including our work on navigating transformative AI and reducing catastrophic biorisk — is on track to spend well over $1 billion in 2026, and might we expect this figure to grow significantly in future years. Timelines to transformative AI seem shorter than they did a few years ago, and we may have only a few remaining years to make a difference. At the same time, the amount of philanthropic capital available for helping with the transition to transformative AI looks much larger. The situation is changing rapidly, and we'll have to make many high-stakes decisions in the coming years. To ensure we make those decisions well, we need the support of exceptional researchers to improve our strategy, identify cruxes, model possible AI trajectories, and assess different interventions to avert global catastrophic risk and improve the long-run future.

We’re hiring for senior research roles across the GCR Central team (led by Emily Oehlsen) and the Short Timelines Special Projects team (led by Claire Zabel). We're open to a wide range of experience levels, and the title and shape of the role will be tailored to the successful candidate. We’re particularly excited about candidates who could manage others and lead a focused research team, in addition to doing research themselves.

Emily Oehlsen and George Rosenfeld lead Coefficient Giving’s GCR division and the teams within it: AI Governance and Policy, Technical AI Safety, GCR Capacity Building, Short Timelines Special Projects, and Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness. We set the GCR division's high-level strategy, manage the program teams, and own high-priority special projects to ensure the division achieves its goal of navigating transformative AI and reducing catastrophic biorisk. We are ultimately responsible for the division’s success, and work on projects that determine how to direct our giving and allocate scarce staff capacity across sub-fields.

Claire Zabel leads the new Short Timelines Special Projects (STSP) team. Our remit is to drive forward new projects that look especially important if timelines to transformative AI are short (i.e. TEDAI arrives within the next one to four years) — and, more specifically, to make sure that wherever funding can vastly improve outcomes in a short-timelines world, it does.

We do what it takes to set up the highest priority projects. That sometimes means making grants, but it often requires other efforts in addition to allocating funds: writing a proposal for an organization that doesn’t yet exist and finding someone to start it; convening a small group of people who should be talking to each other; doing the macrostrategy research that tells us what the right grant programs even are; or working with for-profit and unconventional levers when they’re the best vehicles for impact. STSP takes on work that falls between the remits of the other GCR teams: identifying what should exist before it exists, finding the right people, and helping it get off the ground.

(The STSP team is also hiring for other roles and may be willing to shape them around the right candidate – for more information on this, see the Appendix).

While all roles share a similar profile in terms of responsibilities and expected skills, there are some differences depending on the team.

We’re hiring a research lead or senior researcher to own the strategic questions that sit above any single team and shape what the whole division does, working as a close thought partner to Emily and George. The decisions we make over the next few years (e.g., which sub-fields to back, how fast to spend, when to start something new) may determine how well we can help humanity in navigating the transition to transformative AI. Many of the questions that should inform those decisions are ones we don’t currently have the time or the specialized depth to answer well. We aim for this role to help close that gap.

This is a senior position, reporting to and working directly with Emily and George. We’re ideally looking for someone who already has enough context on AI strategy to engage the hardest questions quickly. We expect to make one senior hire, and could build a small team around a strong lead over time.

Here are some examples of the questions we’d expect this person to own:

No. The application form lets you indicate interest in any or all of the three roles, and the evaluation process is heavily overlapping by design: we're looking for similar candidate profiles across all three. Tell us if you have a preference and we'll take it seriously, but staying open won't count against you; we'll work out together where you'd add the most value as the process goes on.

We think that transformative AI is plausible within one to four years, and that short timelines are plausibly likely enough to act on. Sensible people have a wide range of views, and so do we. The case for organizing a team around shorter timelines doesn’t require certainty, and (i) the evidence has shifted toward shorter timelines over the last couple of years; (ii) the cost of being prepared if timelines are short is likely much lower than the cost of being unprepared; and (iii) much of the work we do is robust across timeline scenarios.

Often, very much so. A meaningful share of what we do is upstream of the next marginal grant — proposals for organizations that don’t yet exist, scoping work, headhunting, ecosystem coordination — where progress is often slow or nonexistent absent active intervention. And as Luke Muehlhauser put it in a recent post, a single new hire can expect to move up to hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, and that “hiring one fewer grantmaker usually means those millions will just sit in an account for another year rather than being deployed to useful ends”. Especially if timelines are short, that might make the difference between the money going unused and the money being used to support a top-priority activity. The research roles are highly counterfactual as well: they help shape high-stakes strategic decisions we have to make one way or another, and strong research capacity means we make better, more calibrated decisions.

Hiring is genuinely difficult for us. We’ve had rounds where we’ve under-hired relative to what we wanted, and lowering our bar would have diffuse but real costs — particularly for our agility and culture, which matter a lot under time pressure, and our ability to do sound decision making in complex and sign-unclear areas. So if you turn down an offer, that probably does mean we have one fewer person doing this work. If counterfactual fit is the deciding factor for you, tell us — and if we make you an offer, we’ll give you our candid read on how counterfactual you are.

Pretty varied. Strong performers tend to grow into a portfolio shaped around their strengths. Likely paths include taking on bigger and more ambitious workstreams and becoming a “general manager” for a given problem or intervention, working with a variety of other funders and philanthropic entities, leading hiring rounds, founding or seeding new organizations, managing people (each of who could move tens or hundreds of millions of dollars every year), or setting strategy for an area of the portfolio. We are particularly keen to hire people who could grow into senior leadership positions.