Program Associate​/Senior Program Associate, Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness Team

About Coefficient Giving

Coefficient Giving is a philanthropic funder and advisor; our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We stress openness to many possibilities and have chosen our focus areas based on importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Our current giving areas include potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, global health and development, scientific research, global public health policy, farm animal welfare, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.

In 2024, we recommended $650 million to high-impact causes, and we’ve recommended over $4 billion in grants since our formation.

The Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness (BPP) team’s mission is to prevent catastrophic biological risks. We have deployed hundreds of millions of dollars, helped to establish several independent organizations, and believe our work has already contributed to reducing some of the most catastrophic risks to humanity. We are building momentum to achieve even more in the coming years.

If you would like to hear more about our work, you can listen to a recent podcast with Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Managing Director for the BPP team, here.

We are looking for multiple Associate Program Officers or Senior Program Associates to join our team. Our goal is to hire a mix of generalist and technical grantmakers — a deep biosecurity background is not necessary to be a strong candidate, and many strong performers on our team have no prior background in biology or biosecurity. For those with specialized expertise and a specific vision, we’re open to more focused roles.

As a Associate Program Officer, you will be responsible for deploying at least $10 million in funding per year. You will be expected to generate ambitious project ideas, headhunt for potential grantees/collaborators who could execute on these projects, hold grantees accountable for performance, and develop processes to streamline this work. Similar expectations apply to Senior Program Associates, who will be responsible for deploying millions in funding initially and increasing amounts over time.

Senior Program Associates typically bring 2-3 years of experience, while Associate Program Officers typically bring 4 or more years of experience.

Some potential grantmaking areas include physical transmission suppression, metagenomic sequencing, personal protective equipment, medical countermeasures, capacity building for the biosecurity field, and work at the intersection of AI and catastrophic biological risk (AIxBio). Expertise in any of these subareas is not required, but would be an asset.

Most grantmakers will have a diverse portfolio, but there are a couple distinct subareas that we hope to find dedicated grantmakers to fully own. These include AIxBio and an ambitious program intended to establish physical defenses against biological threats on “short timelines” — i.e. scenarios where rapid AI progress occurs in the next few years.

Who we’re looking for

We expect the strongest candidates to have:

• High agency. You will push to make the right thing happen on large, unscoped projects, even if it requires rolling up your sleeves to do something unusual, difficult, and/or time-consuming.

• A rigorous and analytical mindset. You evaluate claims skeptically, reason quantitatively about tradeoffs, and question the fundamental assumptions of a given problem.

• Clear communication. You avoid buzzwords and abstractions, and give concise arguments with transparent reasoning.

• High emotional intelligence. You have good judgment for people, a knack for navigating hard conversations, and an intuitive sense of who should be informed and consulted.

• A sense of urgency. We have a limited amount of time to get safeguards and defenses up, and you’ll run through walls to make this happen fast.

• [Ideally] Relevant knowledge. You have either a technical background, grantmaking experience, and/or existing biosecurity knowledge.

We also expect all staff to model our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness.

The ideal candidate for this position will…