Expression of interest: writer/researcher

80,000 Hours is always interested in hiring full-time writers / researchers to explain why and how people can use their careers to help society navigate the transition to a world with transformative AI.
If you’re interested in one of these roles, please email [email protected] and include:
- Your name
- LinkedIn profile
- Links to any writing you’ve done that you think demonstrates your skills
- A few paragraphs about your interest in the role
Table of Contents
80,000 Hours’ mission and impact
80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems.
As of 2025, we are focusing especially on helping explain why and how our audience can help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI.
More writers would enable us to help more people find careers aimed at making AGI go well, and actually have a big positive impact in them. To take just two examples: we’d love to have guides to working in politics or advocacy in order to support policies that reduce catastrophic risks from AI. Both of these paths are potentially high-impact, neglected, and can be confusing. We’re well positioned to help more people pursue them — but we don’t have the writing capacity right now.
Over four million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is the biggest driver of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks. And due to its wide reach and highly sought-after career advice, the web programme is among our most cost-effective programmes.
Our most popular pieces get over 10,000 unique visitors each month, and are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.
The roles
We’re looking for people who could excel in either or both of two overlapping profiles:
- Generalist writer/editor — crafting clear, engaging content based on existing research and team input.
- Writer-researcher — combining strong writing skills with research, with a greater focus on investigating more complex topics and articles.
In both cases, you’d do things like:
- Research and write new articles, e.g. articles explaining particular issues within AI risk reduction for a popular audience, like digital minds and AI-enabled human power grabs, or guides for succeeding in specific careers like AI policy
- For us, research often looks like diving into denser, more academic work and interviewing people with experience in relevant fields, and distilling the relevant information into opinionated overviews and guides.
- Editing – provide comments and suggestions to improve pieces by teammates or external contributors
- Update and rewrite articles with new information or to appeal to new audiences
- Write and edit substantive newsletters for an audience of over 500,000 people
- Write and update popular “landing pages” like our AGI or pressing problems pages, which receive 10,000+ visitors/month
- Create and curate resources for people to use to make high-impact career choices, like reading lists, worksheets, and reader stories
- Manage and edit external expert contributors to write articles
Working as a writer/researcher at 80,000 Hours can help you develop a valuable skill set as an AI-safety-literate researcher and communicator, which is an especially in-demand skill set as discussions about AI risks become increasingly high stakes and public. One previous writer/researcher went on to become head of alignment at UK AISI.
Who we’re looking for
In short, we’re looking for strong writers, who understand the AI risk landscape and who can create excellent content that will help people have a bigger positive impact with their careers.
In slightly more words, you might be a great fit if you have:
- Strong knowledge of catastrophic risks from AI and ideally also effective altruism
- Experience in writing, research, communications, or community-building focused on AI or EA
- An aptitude for — and ideally a track record of — compelling and informed writing
- The ability to turn research notes or a brief into writing that is simultaneously interesting, easy to read, nuanced, precise, accurate, and clear — and maybe even funny
- The ability to figure out what’s true, what’s unknown, and what’s relevant for career decisions given a complex and changing situation with our top priority problems, often amidst expert disagreement
- Interest in adopting whatever tools and resources are helpful, including LLMs, to create more and better content (consistent with maintaining a high bar on quality and accuracy).
- The ability to learn quickly and independently
- Excitement and flexibility to work on whatever projects are highest priority in a fast-paced and highly collaborative environment, including small writing projects that need to get done quickly (e.g. updates, newsletters)
- Interest in learning continually from analytics, article performance, and expert and user feedback to make future work more useful and more engaging
- A good fit with our cultural values.
- For example, we are a small team trying to do difficult and ambitious things — this means we often pitch in on lots of aspects of one another’s work, and really value teamwork, kindness, cooperation, and good communication!
There’s a lot of variety in the tasks these roles involve, particularly how much they require research skills. We’re excited about candidates who can do both excellent writing and excellent research, as well as candidates whose strengths are primarily on the writing side. So if that’s you, please do not rule yourself out!
Helpful backgrounds include AI-related research and communication, UX writing, EA nonprofits, think tanks, academic or nonprofit research, blogging or writing a lot on X (Twitter), journalism, nonfiction writing, podcasting, and social science.
We’re aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles. We’d like to especially encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply!
Salary, hours, location, and benefits
The salary will vary based on experience, location, and the responsibilities you take on, and will be calculated according to a formula that is transparent to all primary staff at 80,000 Hours. For this role, your starting salary would probably be between £50,000–£87,000 or $67,000–$120,000/year.
Staff can work flexible hours. We encourage staff to work whatever schedule (consistent with full time status) will allow them to be most personally effective.
We’re especially interested in people who can work in the US, and especially from Berkeley for time-zone reasons, but do not have a strict location requirement. We are a remote-friendly team, and have a London office as well as access to a shared office in Berkeley, CA. While we can’t guarantee US visas, we have a very strong chance of being able to sponsor a visa for Canadian, Mexican, or Australian nationals. Unfortunately, for other nationalities, it’s less likely.
Our US benefits package is:
- 25 days of paid holiday, plus US public holidays
- Up to 10 days of paid sick leave per year, in addition to holiday
- Private medical insurance with substantial coverage for your dependents (including your partner)
- Long-term disability insurance
- Business travel insurance
- Retirement plan with employer contributions
- Up to 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave and childcare allowance for children under five
- $6,000 annual mental health support allowance
- $6,000 annual self-development budget
- The option to use 10% of your time for self-development
Our UK benefits package is similar.