Chief Executive Officer

We are no longer hiring for this position.

Start date: As soon as possible
Status: Full-time employee, salaried
Compensation: Negotiable, starting at $80k, with some raises expected
Work Location: Berkeley, CA
Reports to: Board of Directors
Application: at the bottom of this page

Note: BERI may decide not to fill this role if our needs change in the course of recruitment, or if no suitable candidate is found. We assign a 33% chance of filling this role by hiring a new staff member, a 33% chance of filling it with an existing staff member, and a 33% chance of not filling it at all.

BERI is seeking a highly educated and qualified Chief Executive Officer to help us pursue our vision of support for the existential risk ecosystem.

Purpose

The purpose of the CEO position is to replace volunteer Executive Director Andrew Critch in overseeing all of BERI’s activities, and to report on those activities to BERI’s Board of Directors, funders, other state and federal governing bodies, and sometimes other institutions with which BERI collaborates, such as universities. This requires ensuring that BERI maintains efficient operations and processes, while maintaining a high degree of inspectability of accounts and records.

BERI’s main function at present is supporting the work of university research centers in the U.S. and U.K. through collaboration. Please read BERI’s FAQ for more information about how BERI works.

Qualifications

Due to the intellectual nature of the work BERI aims to support, we are seeking a candidate with a strong intellectual background as well as management and operations experience. Thus, we expect our most promising candidates will fit one of the following qualification categories:

  • Either:
    • Excellent management and operations background and strong intellectual background: Previous experience as CEO, COO, or similar at an organization with over $10M in assets or more than 5 employees reporting to them, and a strong intellectual background in thinking about science and technology, e.g., a MSc in a STEM field and familiarity with x-risk-relevant literature;
  • Or:
    • Excellent intellectual and operations background and strong management background: A PhD in a STEM discipline, JD, or MD, along with business management experience, operations experience, and coding experience in a business context.

If you feel you do not meet these qualifications but are still interested in applying, please err on the side of applying anyway.

Responsibilities

As our CEO, you’d need to oversee systems that simultaneously support all of our activities. Areas of responsibility and leadership will include:

  • Fundraising and reporting to funders
  • Managing staff time and priorities
  • Finance, accounting, and financial planning
  • Recruitment
  • Legal contracts
  • Human resource management (“HR”)
  • Office management
  • Internal communication management
  • General systematization and optimization of workflows

These responsibilities may be delegated to other BERI staff members reporting to the CEO, but must be understood sufficiently well by the CEO as to oversee them effectively and notice errors made by staff. Conversely, the candidate must also be comfortable deferring to final say from BERI’s Board of Directors when the Board agrees on a significant change to the organization, as well as influence from funders that are trusted by the Board of Directors to impact BERI’s direction via substantial grants.

The ideal candidate

BERI strives to become the type of organization that gets things quickly, sustainably, and legibly. To that end, we’re looking for someone who will:

  • Ensure the maintenance of a wide variety of readily available reports of BERI’s ongoing activities and finances for communication with the BERI’s Board of Directors, funders, financial auditors, legal counsel, and other stakeholders.
  • Oversee the creation of efficient systems and procedures to maintain these reports while freeing up the time and attention of staff, to build capacity for more mission-driven responsibilities.
  • Build efficient checks into their and others’ systems to help ensure mistakes are prevented at best, and are caught at worst.
  • Examine the ethical, legal, and financial implications of their activities to notice when more research or discussion is needed before taking action, while being ready to move the organization quickly on ethically sound opportunities.

Benefits Include

  • Time-off (paid vacation, holidays, sick, bereavement, & parental leave)
  • Generous professional development policy
  • Platinum health, dental, and vision insurance (93-96% of premium covered by BERI)
  • Life and long-term disability insurances (100% of premiums covered by BERI), and health, dependent care, and transportation FSAs
  • Office meals & snacks
  • Semi-flexible work schedule including hours, location, and unpaid vacation policies

(Click here to apply)