Global Aid Policy - Associate Program Officer

Coefficient Giving • Full-time • Washington, District of Columbia, United States • $195.50k / year • 9h ago

About Coefficient Giving

Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) is a philanthropic funder and advisor. Since 2014, we’ve directed over $5 billion in grants as part of our mission to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We work with a range of donors who share our commitment to cost-effective, high-impact giving. Our current funds include Science and Global Health R&D, Navigating Transformative Artificial Intelligence, Abundance & Growth, Farm Animal Welfare, Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness, and more. In 2025, we recommended more than $1 billion to high-impact causes.

We’re proud of our track record:

Our grants to evidence-backed global health programs have saved over 100,000 lives, and our farm animal welfare grants have improved the lives of over 3 billion animals.
We supported late-stage clinical trials for the R21 malaria vaccine, now being scaled to protect millions of kids globally.
We were the earliest major funder of the YIMBY movement to build more housing. Our grantees have led the charge on major wins like City of Yes in New York, and SB 79 in California, which will enable hundreds of thousands of new housing units.
We jump-started the field of AI safety and security and have played a vital role in addressing other existential threats, such as mirror bacteria.

About the Global Aid Policy team

The Global Aid Policy program, launched in 2022 and led by Norma Altshuler, works to increase both the amount and the impact of wealthy countries' foreign aid — one of the highest-leverage opportunities in global development.

As a team, we are unusually flexible about our policy agenda. We're open to any approach that could substantially increase the quantity and/or quality of aid and other forms of development finance that can improve people's health and wellbeing. Our grantmaking is not restricted by sector or geography, and we fund a broad array of tactics including lobbying, incubating new advocacy and research organizations, and directly supporting analytical capacity within aid agencies.

Our work spans a wide range of contexts: supporting faith and business leaders advocating to protect aid levels, backing think tanks to develop high-impact policy reforms, and funding technical support to help aid agency leaders design and implement evidence-based programs. We've made grants in more than ten donor countries across Europe and East Asia, and we've significantly increased our U.S. policy grantmaking in response to the rapidly shifting landscape of U.S. foreign aid.

We expect our geographic focus and policy agenda to continue evolving based on where we think we can do the most good — and we're looking for colleagues who are excited to help shape that evolution.

About the role

We're hiring an Associate Program Officer to join the Global Aid Policy team, based in Washington, D.C.

This is a substantive, senior individual contributor role. You'll be expected to take real ownership of grant opportunities and to build your own portfolio of relationships and grant decisions — including, over time, a multimillion-dollar portfolio of grants shaping U.S. aid policy and/or multilateral institutions like the World Bank. Strong performers can expect to grow into significant responsibility, including leading substantial portions of our grantmaking and managing relationships with senior government officials and civil society leaders. Day-to-day, your work will involve:

Speaking with leaders in the field to identify promising grantees and understand the policy landscape
Analyzing whether a grant will cost-effectively advance our program's priorities, including writing up your reasoning for making specific grants
Conducting back-of-the-envelope calculations (BOTECs) to estimate the social return on investment of different opportunities
Monitoring grantee progress and managing check-ins
Contributing to program strategy discussions and helping evaluate new policy priorities

Who might be a good fit

This role sits at the intersection of rigorous analytical thinking and effective policy engagement. The strongest candidates will bring both a genuine comfort with evidence-based reasoning and cost-effectiveness analysis, and the political judgment and relationship skills to translate that thinking into real-world impact.

We recognize that people come to this intersection from different directions. Some candidates will have built analytical depth first — through think tanks, research institutions, or multilateral organizations — and developed policy instincts along the way. Others will have spent years embedded in Washington's policy world, working on the Hill, in the executive branch, or at major advocacy organizations, and developed a view of how evidence can (and can't) drive change through clear-eyed observation. We're genuinely interested in both trajectories, and in candidates who combine elements of each.

You might be a great fit if you have:

Strong policy understanding and judgment — you can identify high-impact levers for policy change and have calibrated views about how governments actually work.
Relational skills — you can build trust and collaborate with a diverse range of stakeholders, including policymakers, bureaucrats, nonprofit leaders, potential grantees, and co-funders. You're comfortable managing senior relationships.
Analytical and quantitative ability — you can conduct cost-effectiveness analyses, construct BOTECs under uncertainty, and draw calibrated conclusions from both quantitative and qualitative data. You don't need prior experience with this specific approach, but you need to show the capacity for it.
Excellent communication skills — you can synthesize complex information and communicate clearly, both verbally and in writing, for a wide range of audiences.
High ownership — you are self-directed, focused on outcomes, and excited to build a multimillion-dollar portfolio of grants shaping U.S. aid policy and/or multilateral institutions like the World Bank.
Global development experience (required) — ideally with some exposure to aid policy (government, think tank, multilateral institutions, advocacy, etc.), though this is not a hard requirement. Policy work of any kind is the most relevant background; candidates without policy experience will be more competitive if they have strong global development experience.
Most competitive candidates will have around 10 years of total experience, with at least 3–5 years in a policy context. We care more about the quality and relevance of your experience than the number of years. Some of this can come from relevant graduate work.

You should also:

Be based in Washington, D.C. (required)
Have the capacity to travel 3-6 times per year, though this can fluctuate
Be excited about our mission and enthusiastic about contributing to its evolution

Grantmaking experience is not required. The ideal candidate will possess many of the skills and experiences described above, but there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. If you are on the fence about applying because you are unsure whether you are qualified, we strongly encourage you to apply.

The ideal candidate for this position will possess many of the skills and experiences described above. However, there is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. If you are on the fence about applying because you are unsure whether you are qualified, we would strongly encourage you to apply.

Role details & benefits

Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $195,500.00, which would be distributed as a base salary of $171,000.00 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $24,500.00 for U.S. hires. We may be open to negotiation for exceptional candidates for whom compensation is likely to be a blocker – please flag this in your application form if so.
Location: Washington, D.C., with some travel required.
Benefits: Our benefits package includes:
Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the U.S. for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.
Dental, vision, and life insurance for you and your family.
Four weeks of PTO recommended per year.
Four months of fully paid family leave.
A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive. This policy also includes a productivity benefit, which provides a set amount for staff to expense items that enhance their productivity.
A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered.
Support for remote work — we’ll cover a remote workspace outside your home if you need one, or connect you with a Coefficient Giving coworking hub in your city. We currently have offices in San Francisco and Washington D.C., and multiple staff working from several other cities in the U.S. and elsewhere.
We can’t always provide every benefit we offer U.S. staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country).
Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, though we can be flexible for the right candidate.

We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please continue to contact jobs@coefficientgiving.org.

Please apply by 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, April 19, 2026 to be considered.

U.S.-based [Program / Operations] staff are typically employed by Coefficient Giving LLC, which is not a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. As such, this role is unlikely to be eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.

We may use AI to assist in the initial screening of applications, including to detect whether candidates have used AI models in drafting their applications. Decisions are always made by a human on our team.

If you have any questions about our use of AI tools, you can email jobs@coefficientgiving.org.