Product Lead, Opportunities Board

ABOUT CEA

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) stewards the movement of people putting effective altruism principles into practice to solve the world’s most pressing problems. We’re working to build a flourishing future by applying evidence, reason, and compassion to challenges like global poverty, animal suffering, and existential risks.

Our work centers on growing and supporting a global community of people who rigorously analyze where they can do the most good – and take action on those insights. Current strategic priorities include increasing understanding of effective altruism and its principles, growing the number of people who are motivated by EA principles to take significant action to address pressing problems, and diversifying funding sources for high-impact work.

We had significant success in 2025, building momentum within CEA. Our headcount grew from 42 to 66 core staff. Program participation (e.g., events, courses, groups) grew https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NKrpEdg7wAgcoHNRG/cea-is-growing-again-25-more-people-engaged-with-our-1 by 20-25% year over year. We merged https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BLvTcMMEQGFYsh6Jw/ea-funds-and-cea-are-merging with EA Funds https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/ and are rapidly scaling up our capacity for grantmaking and associated fundraising: our first Fund staffed with full-time employees (EA Animal Welfare Fund https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare) raised almost as much as the previous three years combined.

In 2026, we’re maintaining ambitious momentum https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Dy4iGHbAkKAQ4t2Dw/building-sustainable-momentum-progress-report-on-cea-s-2025 while building the foundations for a step-change in the wider EA ecosystem’s growth trajectory from 2027 onwards.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The team behind the Opportunities Board is responsible for helping people discover and pursue high-impact career opportunities. We combine product development, user research, marketing, engineering, and operations to build and improve a product that helps people find impactful work and better understand how they can contribute to solving the world's most pressing problems.

As Product Lead, you'll own the board's strategy and day-to-day development, working with software engineers, contractors, and colleagues across CEA to grow the product and maximise its impact.

CEA’s Opportunities Board https://www.effectivealtruism.org/opportunities is a free, curated board of high-impact opportunities, hosted on effectivealtruism.org http://effectivealtruism.org. It brings together full-time roles, fellowships, internships, volunteering, and courses helping people find impactful work and understand how they can contribute to the world’s most pressing problems.

The board was revived in early 2025 and given focused attention in early 2026; monthly visitors have grown from around 1,500 at the start of 2025 to around 7,900 now. Early signals on product-market fit are encouraging: of the respondents to our most recent survey, 36 out of 45 said they would be very disappointed if they could no longer use the board, and around 32% of visits click through to view an opportunity.

The opportunity here is growing. The 80,000 Hours job board provides a strong precedent and track record for the impact potential of this kind of service, but has narrowed its focus toward AI and is featuring fewer non-AI roles, leaving a gap for a broad, trusted board covering opportunities within a wider range of top problems. The board’s goal is to increase the number of people who land high-impact roles, both by helping them find and apply to specific opportunities, and by helping earlier-stage people orient, build skills, and work out where they fit.

The board is now shifting from initial discovery into validating and scaling the model. We have evidence of demand, healthy engagement, and a plausible path to cost-effective impact at scale. What is needed now is a capable operator to own the board, grow it, and chase the ceiling of just how much impact this can generate.

ABOUT THE ROLE

You'll own the strategy and execution of CEA's Opportunities Board.

The board has strong early traction, but there are two outstanding big questions: can we drive enough traffic to the board, and can we convert from traffic to placements into high-impact roles at a high enough rate? The track record of comparable job boards (especially 80,000 Hours) provides strong precedent here, but we need to experiment and validate that we can drive impact at scale through our own board.

Alongside answering these, there are larger opportunities to explore: a logged-in experience with CV upload and matching, an AI career advisor, or evolving the board into a myriad of potential more comprehensive products helping people to land new high-impact roles.

You'll inherit a working product with existing infrastructure, growing traffic, and a body of evidence about what's working and what isn't https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sl64pJNPS0Tb0WQtNmvws4EIkg4POGAWNQZrUbKFAB8/edit?tab=t.0, including user research and a detailed handover document. Your job will be to use that foundation to grow the board's reach and its positive impact; iterating on the product itself while testing and refining the marketing channels that will drive sustainable growth.

You'll combine product thinking with hands-on execution. You'll make strategic calls about what to focus on and what to drop, then build it; shipping changes to the board, running marketing experiments, setting up tracking, and exploring new directions. You'll be able to work with contractors, such as for marketing experiments or curating the board's listings, and with our staff software engineers to make technical changes. You will have flexibility to choose what to handle yourself, delegate, outsource, or automate.

One version of success in this role is getting the board running well with little ongoing input: quickly making the highest priority improvements or automating enough of the work that running the board takes only a small fraction of your time, and then taking on another responsibility within CEA. That might be management of another product, launching a new product, AI uplift responsibilities, or a product engineering role, depending on the skills and expertise you bring.

You'll report at first to Jamie Harris, our Courses Project Lead who has been advising on the initial testing and development of the board, potentially shifting to a new manager once we hire a Head of Digital Product later in the year.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

PRODUCT DELIVERY AND IMPROVEMENT

• Iterate the board’s framing, UX, and features to better serve target users and increase the rate at which they find, apply to, and land high-impact opportunities

• Ship improvements to the board, either working hands-on in the codebase or delegating to software engineers: filters, search, SEO and AEO pages, tracking

• Improve the sourcing and curation of high-impact opportunities, likely delegating the day-to-day work to a virtual assistant or contractor

• Run experiments with clear success criteria across every stage of the theory of change, from growing traffic to increasing the rate at which users land high-impact roles

• Build the tracking and evaluation needed to understand whether, how, and for whom the board is working, including placement data, conversion, and retention

GROWTH AND MARKETING

• Develop and test a marketing plan to grow traffic to the board reliably and repeatedly, likely in collaboration with contractors

• Find the channels that work, and double down on the most cost-effective and repeatable ones

• Prioritise and optimise targets across traffic, engagement, and placements

PRODUCT STRATEGY

• Refine the target audience, the user needs you’re addressing, and the board’s curation and feature set

• Continue to test and (in)validate the open strategic questions: whether the board leads to placements, and whether traffic can be grown enough for the board to be cost-effective at scale

• Explore the larger opportunity in this space and decide which bigger bets to pursue, for example a logged-in experience (CV upload, profiles, and matching), an AI career advisor, or evolving the board into a broader careers product

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

You might be a great fit for this role if you have:

• A product-development mindset: You understand what makes products compelling, and can design experiments with clear success criteria and make hard decisions based on data (qualitative and quantitative)

• Impact focus: You are laser-focused on achieving exceptional levels of positive social impact through your work and the product, and strongly align with effective altruism principles

• Strategic thinking skills: You have a track record of setting a clear vision, developing actionable strategies, and adapting plans based on new insights and evidence

• Marketing instinct: You can attract and grow an audience and run acquisition experiments across channels such as paid ads, SEO and answer engine optimisation, email, and social

• Comfort with delegating and managing: You can brief and coordinate software engineers, plus contractors like marketers or virtual assistants, to get work done

• Execution velocity: You ship things. You don’t just theorise about new ideas, you build and test them

• Scout mindset & reasoning transparency: You actively seek out evidence that challenges your assumptions, change your mind when warranted, and explain your reasoning openly

• Familiarity with the impact-focused talent landscape: You understand the impact-focused career and talent landscape well enough to curate the board sensibly and to hold your own in conversations with people working in unusually impactful cause areas

• (Bonus) Technical execution: You’re comfortable building and shipping changes to a live web product, working hands-on in the codebase with (or without) the help of AI coding tools

• (Bonus) Experience with job boards, marketplaces, or other two-sided products, or with growth, SEO, and scaling digital products

• (Bonus) Appetite for exploring new directions: You’re excited to explore and build bigger bets, like a logged-in experience or an AI career advisor, and comfortable with the ambiguity of zero-to-one work, not only optimising what already exists

We don't expect one person to be excellent at all of these. Strong candidates will be excellent at several and willing to grow into the rest, and you'll be able to lean on collaborators and contractors to cover areas you're less comfortable with, for example bringing in marketing or engineering support where useful.

OTHER INFORMATION

• This is a full-time, remote position. We prefer applicants who are able to work in time zones between US Pacific Time and CET. We have an office in Oxford, UK, that you would have access to.

• Start date: September 2026 or sooner

• Reports to: Jamie Harris, Courses Project Lead

• Compensation

  • US: total compensation package of $109,867 , comprising a base salary of $99,879 , and a 10% unconditional 401k contribution.

  • UK: total compensation package of £66,095 , comprising a base salary of £60,087 , and a 10% pension contribution.

  • Other locations: For candidates outside the US and UK, we base compensation on our UK salary structure and adjust for the cost of employment and fixed local benefit costs to create an equivalent package

• Benefits in the US/UK include private health insurance, flexible work hours, a $6,000 / £5,000 annual professional development allowance, a $6,000 / £5,000 mental health support allowance, extended parental leave, ergonomic equipment, 25 days of paid vacation, and more.

• This role will involve travel. There are likely 2-4 trips annually, including several international trips to attend team retreats and events worldwide.

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from self-identified women and people of colour who are excited about contributing to our mission. The Centre for Effective Altruism is an equal opportunity employer. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

CEA participates in E-Verify for US employees.

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EVALUATION PLAN

We expect the interview process to include the following steps, subject to minor changes:

• Application Review

• Test task

• Screening Interview

• Final interviews (2, one culture-fit, one with Hiring Manager)

• 1 day work trial (task based)

• Reference checks