We are hiring a mid-to-late career generalist to advance global health and wellbeing

I co-lead lead a team within Renaissance Philanthropy focused on helping major donors identify and support the best opportunities to do good in the world. Our work spans a wide range of topics, but our major focus is improving human health and wellbeing with a particular focus on the global poor. We are inspired by past examples of outsized good like the Green Revolution and the elimination of leaded gasoline. We aspire to replicate those examples, either by directing philanthropic funding towards existing projects or, in cases where we've identifed a problem without an owner, by incubating new projects. These projects often take the form of a thesis-driven philanthropic fund led by a "General Manager," an exceptional individual with a charge to own a problem holistically, doing whatever it takes to solve it. 

We are a small team currently (in addition to myself and a co-lead, we have just one full-time employee along with, at any given point, ~5 part-time contractors), but it is possible we will grow substantially as demand for this type of work appears poised to scale substantially. 

To start, we are recruiting one additional talented generalist to help us diligence ideas and teams and also to incubate new projects, including recruiting the talent to lead them. The work will span three major areas: 

1. Diligence. We have a long list of funding opportunities to evaluate. Our process for diligence combines a strong focus on GiveWell-style quantitative estimates of cost-effectiveness paired with a VC-inspired approach that indexes heavily on the quality of founders and leaders.
2. Origination and incubation. When we find a problem with strong evidence and no natural owner, we try to take it from idea to fundable project. For example, after determining that potassium-enrichment of salt is a promising intervention to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease, we recruited a GM to make it happen. We'd like to do that much more.
3. Donor and ecosystem engagement We prepare research, briefings, and investment cases for the philanthropists we advise, and try to build strong working relationships with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the areas we are funding. 

The ideal candidate  is an analytical, high-agency generalist. You have gone deep enough in at least one area to know what rigor feels like, but you are energized by a wide scope. Concretely, the ideal candidate might: 

• have ~5–15 years across some mix of entrepreneurship, research, investing, grantmaking, policy, or running programs in government;
• be exceptional at quantitative analysis, including cost-effectiveness modeling, and fast at finding the frontier of a new topic or field
• bring real experience with global health and development, ideally including work alongside people in low- and middle-income countries;
• write and think clearly enough to make a complex case legible to a busy donor.

You do not need to check every one of these boxes. If you read the mandate and felt more excited than daunted, we'd rather hear from you than not. You can apply here or feel free to email us (first name.last [email protected]).