Salesforce Administrator and Technical Project Manager

About Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a philanthropic funder and advisor. Our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We stress openness to many possibilities and have chosen our focus areas based on importance, neglectedness, and tractability. 

Our current giving areas include potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, scientific research, global public health policy, farm animal welfare, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. In 2023, we recommended just under $800 million to high-impact causes, and we’ve recommended over $3 billion in grants since our formation.

About the Salesforce team

At Open Philanthropy, we use Salesforce to manage our grantmaking. We aim to make our system a user-friendly, end-to-end solution for grant processing and information management. Our Salesforce user base is around 150 and growing, and our instance is low-record-volume but high-touch and high-complexity, with lots of customization. This role will work closely with our existing team to support the following functions:

Salesforce:

• Own the user support life cycle, resolving simple cases where possible, and consulting with or escalating to other stakeholders as necessary. Keep-case resolution on track and nudge stakeholders as necessary.
• Build and provide feedback on existing Salesforce reports and dashboards.
• Onboard new users, personalizing the standard half-hour hands-on welcome as needed to a given new user’s role and needs.
• Create and maintain documentation related to Salesforce functionality.
• Proactively propose potential enhancements or bug fixes to existing systems and processes.
• Serve as a business analyst on some projects, working with stakeholders to document existing processes and user requirements and then refine them into a collection of user stories, each with a “definition of done”.
• As assigned, develop new solutions which may include declarative or programmatic approaches (you don’t need to be a developer, but please mention it if you are or have some development experience).

Project Management:

• Serve as project manager for all Salesforce-adjacent projects:
• Guard project scope
• Allocate engineering capacity and keep stakeholders up to speed about project progress
• Help make sure all stakeholders are meeting deadlines and are not blocked or awaiting work from others
• Work in an agile model to facilitate the estimation, prioritization, and execution of tasks.

Who might be a good fit

We are looking for someone with experience administering Salesforce, preferably with experience in technical project management. 

A successful candidate will also demonstrate most of these qualities:

• Curious: our team wants to know more about the “why”. We want to know how users are actually interacting with the products we build for them.
• User-centered: our team gets satisfaction from making our users’ lives easier. We’re relentless in our desire to eliminate unnecessary friction for our staff and grantees.
• Tenacious: we approach technical challenges with a try-and-try-again approach, we don’t give up when the first or second approach doesn’t pay off.
• Unflappable: we keep our cool when asked a question we don’t know the answer to (yet!) and when dealing with all kinds of users, from new hires to senior leadership.
• Great communication: we communicate clearly, concisely, and with an appropriate tone in documentation and written communication.
• Approachable: users should feel happy to ask us questions, tell us when something is slowing them down, and seek our help.
• Flexible: we don’t get tied to one solution; we’re able to cater to many stakeholders with different preferences and processes. We know that occasionally abandoning good ideas and project progress in response to new organizational needs is part of the work.
• Organized: we love to make plans and see them executed, keep people around us on track, and demonstrate excellent attention to detail.
• Problem-solving: we find creative new approaches and then tweak them (and tweak them, and tweak them again); we enjoy the puzzle-like aspect of solving hard problems in novel ways; we pride ourselves on coming up with a few possible solutions to a challenge and then picking the very best option.

We expect all our staff to: 

• Put our mission first, and act with urgency to help us realize our ambitious goals.
• Work to model our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness.

The ideal candidate for this position will possess many of the skills and experiences described above. However, there is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. Above all, we are looking for people motivated to contribute to our mission of helping others as much as we can with the resources available to us. Whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this role would make you excited to come to work every day.

Role details & benefits 

• Compensation: Compensation for this role is $141,696.84, which would be distributed as a base salary of $123,214.64 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $18,482.20. 
• These compensation figures assume a remote location; there would be geographic adjustments upwards for candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington, D.C.
• For internationally based hires, all compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary.
• We aim to pay competitively enough to make salary unlikely to be a major consideration for candidates who would otherwise be interested in taking this role. If concern about compensation is keeping you from applying, we encourage you to reach out to jobs@openphilanthropy.org.
• Time zones and location: You can work remotely. While we are not able to sponsor visas for this role, we are open to hires outside the US. This position would require enough flexibility to overlap with Eastern Time for a portion of the work day.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer — likely in January or February 2025. 
• Benefits: Our benefits package includes: 
• Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.
• Dental, vision, and life insurance for you and your family.
• Four weeks of PTO are recommended per year. 
• Four months of fully paid family leave.
• A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive. 
• A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered.  
• Support for remote work — we’ll cover a remote workspace outside your home if you need one, or connect you with an Open Phil coworking hub in your city.
• Note: We can’t always provide every benefit we offer US staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country). 
• Note: U.S.-based operations staff are typically employed by Open Philanthropy Project LLC, which is not a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. As such, this role is unlikely to be eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.

We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.

If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@openphilanthropy.org.

The deadline for this application is Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.