Posted today · be early
Senior Research Manager - Animal Welfare
Rethink Priorities
WorldwideremotePosted today
Skill Required
Research-ManagerResearch-DirectorAnimal-Welfare-ScienceProgram-ManagerSenior-Research-AnalystSenior-Qualitative-Research-ManagerSenior-Research-ScientistSenior-ResearcheranalyticaldesigningbuildingdesignandAI
Key highlights
- Compensation: $98,500 - $125,000 USD (or equivalent)
- Required Experience: Management and decision-oriented research experience
- Key Benefit: Remote-first with unlimited vacation and mandated org-wide breaks
- Notable Requirement: Availability between 3pm and 5pm UK time
- Experience Level: Senior Research Manager / Leadership
- Flexibility: Open to part-time candidates (min 24 hrs/week)
Role overview
Rethink Priorities' Animal Welfare Department is splitting into three teams, including a new Animal Welfare Strategy Team. This team will focus on supporting and accelerating funders and organizations toward achieving their core goals of accelerating the end of low-welfare farming and reducing the suffering of animals on farms, specifically focusing on terrestrial vertebrates, through a mix of consulting work, in-house research, and other activities. The department seeks a Senior Research Manager to lead this new team. Reporting to Sam Hilton, Acting Director of the Animal Welfare Department, this leadership role involves setting team strategy, prioritizing projects, managing staff (including economists), and maximizing impact for animals in a growing and restructuring department.
Responsibilities
- Manage consulting intake: Decide which requests from funders, advocacy organizations, and entrepreneurs RP takes on, reshapes, or declines.
- Identify opportunities and act on them: Bring forward ideas with outsized upside, research or otherwise. For research, set an agenda of priority projects. For other interventions, such as regranting or talent programs, decide whether RP should run them and launch what clears the bar.
- Oversee the Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum: Ensure your team sets the agenda, decides who is in the room, and turns the movement's annual leaders' gathering into decisions and impact.
- Set strategy: Decide how this team prioritizes, how it measures impact and what work it takes on; build project prioritization processes, impact frameworks, and intake systems alongside the Director.
- Hire: Decide which skills the team needs next (policy, M&E, animal science, movement experience) and run the rounds with support from RP's in-house recruitment specialist.
- Manage the team: Lead economists and specialists with deeper expertise than yours in their own fields, set the quality bar, and implement research processes, review standards, and project tracking.
- Deliver research that gets used: Scope clients' decisions, manage staff to deliver on deadline, and follow up on whether clients acted on the findings.
- Represent RP: Build the networks and relationships that generate new projects and attend conferences where travel is possible.
- Fundraise: Raise additional funds as the team grows with the support of the Development Team.
Requirements
- Impact first: Driven to have as much impact for animals as possible; committed to integrity in research, following evidence, and transparency.
- Decision-oriented research experience: Experience conducting or overseeing research aimed at informing or influencing a specific stakeholder's decision.
- Good judgment: Demonstrated judgment in prioritization and decision-making under uncertainty.
- Management experience: Experience managing or mentoring others, including people with deeper expertise than yours, or clear readiness to step into a people-management role.
- Strategy and process design: Experience of, or clear ability to set a team's strategy and build processes to deliver it where none existed.
- Research review skills: Ability to interrogate both qualitative and quantitative analysis you did not produce, and to 'think at the margin' about cost-effectiveness.
- Communication skills: Excellent reasoning transparency (showing assumptions and evidence behind conclusions) and strong ability to synthesize complex information and communicate strategic insight in writing and in person.
- Delivery: Track record of getting projects finished, on deadline, involving other people; ability to work and make autonomous decisions in a remote, asynchronous, international environment.
- Professional level of English language.
Nice to have
- Consulting experience: Consulting or other client-facing analytical work, including identifying client decisions, shaping/declining work, and building relationships with clients and fundraising leads.
- Experience of the animal organizational landscape: Professional or voluntary experience of animal advocacy and working knowledge of the organizational landscape, funders, and strategic debates.
- In-depth expertise in a relevant area such as economics, policy and regulation, M&E, or animal science.
- Events and convening experience: Running convenings or facilitating events that bring together groups with differing interests.
- Talent development experience: Running talent programs or fellowships.
- Grantmaking experience: Distributing funds and evaluating organizations for funding.
Benefits
- Opportunity to contribute to a fast-growing, high-impact organization where research is used by key decision-makers influencing hundreds of millions of charitable dollars.
- Remote-first environment with flexible work hours and schedule, including virtual co-working spaces and a private Rethink Priorities Focusmate group.
- Comprehensive global benefits program, including statutory benefits as required by local law and supplemental benefits specific to each country.
- Unlimited vacation with a minimum number of required statutory days off.
- 'Mandated' 3 weeks total mid- and end-year organization-wide breaks.
- Unlimited (within reason) personal and sick paid and unpaid leave.
- Parental leave: At least 4-9 months of a combination of paid and unpaid leave, available prior to and/or during the first 2 years after a child's birth or adoption.
- Other paid and unpaid leave (e.g., bereavement).
- Technology stipend of $2,000 USD equivalent every 3 years for work and office equipment.
- AI tools budget of $40 USD equivalent monthly.
- Professional Development Budget of $4,000 USD per year, including workshops/training and up to 10% of work time for professional and personal development.
- Paid work trips, including one annual all-staff Mega Team Retreat and relevant conferences.
- A caring team that values respectful work relations and a healthy work-life balance.
- Low administrative bureaucracy.
- Option for a box of Oreos to be mailed to you.
Additional details
- Ideal start date: Monday 4th January 2027.
- The team will have 1–2 economist staff ready to join.
- Salary: $98,500 - $125,000 USD / £76,590 - £97,176 GBP / €89,459 - €113,527 EUR pre-tax (not restricted to these currencies).
- Salary is based on title level and calculated using RP’s salary algorithm; RP does not negotiate salaries.
- The role is fully remote; legal hiring in many countries. Visa sponsorship to the US or UK may be possible in certain cases.
- Time Zone Requirement: Availability for meetings between 3pm and 5pm UK time on most weekdays.
- Full and Part Time: Open to full-time and part-time (at least 24 hours/week), though 30+ hours/week is preferred.
- Travel: Not an essential or mandatory requirement, but encouraged.
- Application Process: 4 stages (Application Prompts, Skills assessment paid at $45 USD/hr, Interviews, Reference checks and offers).
- Application details: Initial assessment is anonymized; do not send a cover letter or include name in prompts. AI (free tier) is permitted if disclosed.
- All application materials must be submitted in English.
- Rethink Priorities is a think-and-do tank founded in 2018 acting as a consultancy, research institute, think tank, and accelerator.
