Open position: Advisor

The role

80,000 Hours provides free career advice to people working on the world’s most pressing problems, including how to help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI. Advising is how that reaches individuals one at a time: 10–12 conversations a week with people who want to do work that matters.

In the conversations, you’ll think on your feet. What’s this person’s comparative advantage? Do they have a realistic picture of the problems they want to work on, and if not, can you give them one? Which introduction or piece of pushback is most likely to shift what they do next? You’re making these calls live, often with people who know their field better than you do, and those decisions can change the shape of a career.

Beyond the conversations themselves, we’re excited to hire advisors who could take ownership of how our programme runs and who it reaches. Depending on your strengths, your interests, and what the team needs, this could include:

• Lead generation and outreach strategy. Own where our bar sits for who we talk to and how we reach them: active outreach, partnerships, targeted advertising, and events.
• Impact evaluation. Design and run the analyses that tell us whether advising is working, and where we should put more effort to make it better.
• Grantmaking. Build a clearer strategy for when small grants unblock a career move, identify opportunities, and assess the grants we’ve already made.
• Special projects. Run experiments: new coaching models, group formats, partnerships with other organisations, or formats we haven’t tried.

What success looks like in your first 12 months

By the end of your first year, we’d expect you to:

• Be running 10–12 calls a week where advisees come away with concrete next steps and a clearer picture of how to think about their impact and where they’re trying to go.
• Have built views on 2–3 subareas of priority problems deep enough to push back credibly on senior advisees working in them.
• If your role has come to include one of the strategic functions above, have driven it end-to-end: set the goal, built the plan, delivered it, and keep iterating. The team should be able to trust this function because you’re running it.
• Be the one who notices when something needs attention. Your manager can’t sit in on all your calls, so it’s on you to flag when a call went badly, you’re unsure how to handle something, or you just want to think it through with someone.
• Be someone who advisees and colleagues across the ecosystem come to when they want a sharp view.

Who this role is for

You’ll enjoy this work and do it well if you:

• Hold views and change them well. You form opinions on hard questions, like whether a given strategy is working, and you’re willing to put them in front of people who may know more than you do. You also update appropriately when you’re wrong.
• Think sharply through messy questions. Giving good advice is a problem-solving process. You enjoy working through open-ended questions where the right answer isn’t obvious, and you can reason clearly even under time pressure on a call.
• Read the room, and push back with care. You take an interest in the people you’re talking with, and can be warm and supportive on sensitive topics while pushing back thoughtfully on someone’s assumptions when it matters. You calibrate what to press on, what to let go, and when a question will land or shut someone down.
• Communicate clearly in high-stakes conversations. You’ll be representing 80,000 Hours in conversations where the goal is often to change how someone thinks about a problem, or how they might contribute. You convey complex ideas clearly, in an engaging and evidence-grounded way.
• Know our world, and know at least one area of it deeply. You have a strong understanding of effective altruism principles and the AI safety ecosystem. You can hold your own on substance with someone working in AI safety, AI policy, or biosecurity, and a specialist in the field would take you seriously on the subject. Specialists in biosecurity or other priority areas are welcome, as long as you’re willing to upskill. You keep up with developments through independent learning, and by building relationships with specialists and hiring managers.
• Have high agency and a track record of getting things done. You’ve run something where nobody handed you the steps: a team, a project, a function, a company. You can make good decisions when the right answer isn’t obvious, you’re comfortable with ambiguity, and you have a working system for staying on top of commitments.
• Find 10–12 serious conversations a week energising rather than draining.

It’s a plus, but not a requirement, if you:

• Have prior advising, coaching, or mentoring experience. (We’ve hired strong advisors without it.)
• Have preexisting networks in AI safety, biosecurity, or similar ecosystems.
• Bring experience that complements the team, like grantmaking, operations, research management, entrepreneurship, or senior policy.

We hire for a team that works as a portfolio, and we don’t expect any one person to be strong in every dimension. What every advisor on the team shares, though, is strong analytical skills, strong communication, knowledge of at least one priority area, and self-direction.

How you’ll work

Advising is one part of 80,000 Hours’ career services programme, alongside the job board, headhunting, and, more recently, AI products like our AdvisorBot. Subteams help each other and share information about what we’re each seeing in the ecosystem.

You’ll report to Laura, advising manager, and work closely with the rest of the advising team, the wider Career Services programme, and colleagues across 80,000 Hours. We have the collaborative culture you’d expect from a place where everyone is trying to get better at hard work they care about.

The advising team is growing and looking to experiment with new approaches. Examples include advising aimed at finding and pitching potential founders, expanding into grantmaking and reaching more senior audiences. We’re hiring people who want to help shape that.

This is a full-time role, ideally based in London; Washington, DC; or the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re open to other locations for the right candidate, provided there’s significant overlap with UK and US working hours.

The start date is flexible. We’d like whoever we hire to start as soon as possible.

Salary and benefits

Salaries at 80,000 Hours are set using a salary calculator visible to all staff, that accounts for the specific role, location, and a candidate’s experience. For this role, we expect it to range from £105k–£125k for London-based staff, $150k–$180k for DC-based staff, $170k–$205k for San Francisco-based staff, $130k–$155k for US remote staff, and £90k–£110k for other remote staff.

We can support both UK and US visa sponsorship, but we cannot guarantee US visa applications will be successful. You can read more about the US visa types we can sponsor here, and make a call on whether you’d still like to apply if that is your only location option.

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 at our London office

How to apply

Apply by 11pm BST on June 2, 2026. We’ll be reviewing applications as they come in and begin assessing candidates as soon as some have met the bar. We reserve the right to close applications before the stated deadline.

The process is likely to include interviews, a work test and/or a live advising assessment with one of our advisors, and a multi-day assessment (preferably in person). We pay for work tests and the multi-day assessment, conditional on location and right to work in the country where you are taking the assessment.

We know factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles where they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We especially encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply, even if you don’t meet every criterion.