Executive Assistant to the CEO

By · Published August 4th, 2025 ·

Summary

We’re hiring an Executive Assistant to the CEO to provide high-quality administrative support to our CEO, Niel, and flexible project support on Office of the CEO priorities. The Office of the CEO is made up of Niel and Jess (Chief of Staff), and is responsible for setting 80k’s strategic direction and keeping the organisation focused on its top priorities.

You’ll support this work by freeing up their time and supporting project execution — providing direct assistance to Niel, taking over the administrative responsibilities that Jess currently owns, and helping on high-priority projects.

The role is a mix of traditional executive assistant responsibilities, like inbox management and calendar coordination, and project-based work to deliver org-wide processes and help the Office of the CEO operate more efficiently and effectively. While much of the work is routine, we’re especially excited about candidates who are keen to grow with the role over time: identifying improvements, automating tasks, and taking on more areas of responsibility as they build context and trust. The role seems like a particularly great opportunity for people who want to gain visibility into the day-to-day of the CEO and how strategic decisions are made at 80,000 Hours, while building experience and career capital.

This hiring round is part of a coordinated effort to grow our operations function. We’re hiring for several specific roles across different teams, and while each has its own focus, the skill sets we’re looking for are largely overlapping, so we’re running a unified hiring round. We expect some candidates might not be sure exactly which role they’re best suited for, or may not fit neatly into a single category. That’s totally fine — we welcome generalist applications and may also hire people into roles that aren’t explicitly listed but align well with our needs.

If you’re not sure which specific role to apply for, you’re welcome to submit a general application to the operations generalist role, which is designed for candidates who are broadly interested in joining the operations team.

If you’d like to apply for a different specific role, here are the other positions we’re currently hiring for:

Location: London, England — strongly preferred so you can work in person with Niel. For exceptional candidates, we’re also open to people working remotely, whose working hours overlap with at least four hours between 1PM–6PM UK time.

Salary: Approximately £41,000 to £75,000, depending on the role and your experience.

To apply, please complete this application form by 11PM BST on Monday, September 1 2025.

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. After more than 10 years of research into dozens of problem areas, we’re putting most of our focus on helping people work on positively shaping the trajectory of AI, because we think it presents the most serious and urgent challenge that the world is facing right now.

We’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, have ~600,000 subscribers to our newsletter, and have given one-on-one advice to over 6,000 people. We’ve also been one of the largest drivers of growth in the effective altruism community.

The role

This role joins Niel and Jess in the Office of the CEO, working closely with them to keep 80,000 Hours running smoothly and focusing on its highest priorities.

Your responsibilities will likely include:

  • Managing Niel’s calendar, inbox, and daily planning
  • Supporting with meeting preparation and follow-up
  • Taking on a variety of ad hoc tasks for Niel. Some recent examples include:
    • Researching metrics for a speech
    • Recommending how to integrate Claude and Asana
    • Booking a restaurant for a meeting
    • Creating a record of Niel’s hiring decisions
  • Owning the logistics for recurring projects that the Office of the CEO is responsible for, such as:
    • Quarterly planning periods
    • The annual review
  • Providing flexible help with priority projects, ranging from retreat programming to senior staff hiring to org strategy. Typical work on these projects might involve:
    • Project/Asana management
    • Scheduling meetings
    • Collecting staff input (e.g. via surveys/polls)
    • Drafting communications to the team
    • Generating and red-teaming ideas, making recommendations
    • Consolidating research/relevant internal documents

We think this role would be great for building career capital in operations and organisational strategy, as you’ll get visibility into the CEO’s work and the day-to-day runnings of 80k. If you are excited about developing into roles like Chief of Staff, Operations Specialists, or a specialist project role — and eventually roles like COO or programme lead — this role might be a good way to gain experience and test your fit.

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for people who are:

  • Organised: you’re able to keep track of a large number of tasks at once, rarely drop balls, and follow through on your commitments. You prioritise sensibly, both in your own work and when supporting others. Experience managing projects is a bonus, but not essential.
  • Detail-oriented: once you’ve got the hang of a task, your work rarely needs correcting. You’re excited about things like getting into the weeds of systems, identifying discrepancies, and making sure we don’t miss important details.
  • Clear communicators: your communication is straightforward, you demonstrate a high level of reasoning transparency, and you enable others to easily identify the most important aspects of your communications.
  • Proactive: you’re good at pushing things forward and suggesting new areas where you can help out. If you’re faced with a challenge or uncertainty, you’re good at thinking through how to solve it so that you already have a best guess by the time you ask for input.
  • Flexible: you’re excited about working on a variety of projects and are motivated to do what’s most valuable to push 80,000 Hours’ mission forward.
  • Excited about supporting our mission: you’re enthusiastic about getting talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems.
  • A good fit with the Office of the CEO team: we frequently use Asana (though no prior experience with Asana is needed for the role), we often cowork using the pomodoro technique, and we’re comfortable pointing out and receiving feedback.

Previous experience

Previous experience in similar roles is not required, though we do prefer to see examples of how you’ve demonstrated the skills above.

Logistics

This is a full-time role. We strongly prefer candidates to be based in London, England — where you can work in person with Niel. We have a relocation budget should you be relocating for the role. We can sponsor visas for this role. For exceptional candidates, we’re also open to people working remotely, whose working hours overlap with at least four hours between 1PM–6PM UK time.

The start date for this role is flexible. Ideally, our chosen candidate would start as soon as possible.

The Executive Assistant to the CEO role will be managed by Jess Binksmith (Chief of Staff).

Salary and benefits

The salary will vary based on skills and experience, but to give a rough sense, we expect starting salaries to be between £41,000–75,000.

Our benefits include:

  • 25 days of paid holiday, plus public holidays
  • Private medical insurance
  • Long-term disability insurance
  • Pension scheme/retirement plan with employer contributions
  • Up to 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave and childcare allowance for children under five
  • £5,000 annual mental health support allowance
  • £5,000 annual self-development budget
  • The option to use 10% of your time for self-development
  • Gym, shower facilities, and unlimited free food provided at our London office

How to apply

To apply, please complete this application form by 11PM BST on Monday, September 1 2025.
We expect the application to take approximately one hour to complete.

We’re aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes, and would especially like to encourage people from under-represented backgrounds to apply, even if you don’t meet all the suggested criteria.

The application process will vary depending on the candidate and role, but is likely to include 1–3 written work tests, an interview, and a multi-day in-person trial. We offer payment for work tests and trials, conditional on your location and right to work in the UK.