About this role
Key Information: Role: Special Projects Director (Leadership) Salary: $130.000 – $160.000 gross annual. For other currencies, we use a 5-year rolling average exchange rate. Location: Fully remote. UTC-5 to UTC+2 preferred. Job Type: Full-time (40 hours per week) preferred, and minimum 35 hours per week required. Reports to: Chief Operations Officer, Carolyn Footitt Start date: As soon as possible, but no later than January 4, 2027 Application Deadline: Monday, October 12, at the end of the day (23:59) Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12:00) . Application Process: Click "Apply Now" to respond to the prompts. We ask that you spend no more than 2 hours preparing your responses to the prompts. Contact: Please email [email protected] if you have any questions. About Special Projects and the Position Rethink Priorities ’ (RP’s) Special Projects Program (SP) — RP's portfolio of fiscally sponsored and incubated projects — is entering its most significant growth phase yet, and this role will own the program end to end. Whoever takes this on will define how SP scales from here, with leadership over its strategy and its growing team. RP is a US 501(c)(3) research and implementation nonprofit working across global health and development, animal welfare, and reducing global catastrophic risk, including risks from advanced AI. Beyond our own research, RP acts as a fiscal sponsor — under a Model A structure — to a portfolio of independent, high-impact projects, each running its own show day to day while RP provides the legal, financial, HR, and compliance support to accelerate them towards spin-off and further impact. SP helps founders get started on their project from day one, eliminating the 6–18 months a founder would otherwise spend standing up a legal entity and becoming tax-exempt. That acceleration matters enormously when the window for impact is short. Beyond speed, SP sponsorship provides a lower-risk environment for testing proof of concept: projects can validate mission fit and demonstrate traction before committing to the cost and complexity of independent legal existence. Our SP program has supported numerous projects through their fastest growth phase, from a headcount size of one to 30+ and multi-million dollar budgets — including Epoch AI , Apollo Research and IAPS , all of which grew under SP before spinning off as independent organizations. SP is growing — more projects, more countries, more complexity — and the systems and approaches that got it this far won't hold at the next size. Growth at this stage could look like taking the team from around 7 FTE today to somewhere in the 12–16 FTE range within a year, and launching upwards of 10 new sponsored projects — but figuring out what growth is actually necessary and appropriate, and at what pace, is a core part of what this role is for. You'll be the first person whose full-time job is building what comes next: a real risk framework, a sustainable fee model, a clear graduation path for projects that have outgrown fiscal sponsorship, and a growth strategy for the ones still to come. You'll manage the Special Project Managers and the rest of the SP team who support sponsored projects day to day. This is a Leadership position at RP, meaning you’ll have a seat at the table for all major organizational strategic decisions and authority to set your team’s strategy, growth plans, and budget. It's a high-leverage position: getting the right systems in place now will position SP for further growth and the ability to support even more impactful projects. This is a role for someone comfortable being the person that a fast-growing team will rely on for new answers and solutions — where "I don't know, let me find out" is a normal Tuesday, and good judgment matters more than a playbook, because there might not be one yet. You won't need to arrive knowing intricate employment law or new AI regulation yet — but you will need to be someone who picks new topics up fast. You'll report to RP's COO, Carolyn Footitt, work closely with our Finance and People & Culture colleagues in the Operations Department, and have real latitude to shape how this program runs. Most of our meetings happen between UTC-5 and UTC+2, where most SP and Core Operations staff are based, so we strongly prefer candidates within these timezones. This isn’t a heavy travel role, but you can expect somewhere around 3-4 trips per year for conferences and team or company retreats. We're able to legally hire in many countries and may be able to offer visa sponsorship or relocation support to the US or UK. This role is open to candidates who are able to commit a minimum 35 hours per week, with a preference for full-time (40 hours) candidates. As the Special Projects Director, your main responsibilities will include: Program Strategy and Growth Own SP's overall strategy and roadmap, positioning the program to capture the current wave of AI-related philanthropic capital and project demand. Decide which projects join, graduate, or spin off from fiscal sponsorship, and build the frameworks behind those calls Own SP's value proposition and Theory of Change with input from RP leadership Evaluate the inbound project pipeline and proactively source new fiscally-sponsored opportunities rather than only waiting for them to arrive Represent SP externally to prospective projects, funders, and peer fiscal sponsors, and sharpen how SP positions itself against other sponsors Explore new service lines where they'd extend SP's value, such as regranting structures Risk, Compliance, and Governance Establish a formal project risk assessment framework covering financial, employment, legal/reputational, and leadership risk, with mitigation measures for top risks. Serve as a senior escalation point on operations compliance matters: HR, finance, and compliance matters. Create a project graduation framework — criteria for when a project should spin out vs. stay within RP, with clear spin-out milestones. Funding and Financial Sustainability Keep the SP fee model fair and sustainable for RP and project directors Track a defined SP revenue target quarterly against a forecast. Building Organizational and Management Capacity Decide when to add capacity, what roles come next, and how management layers evolve as headcount and project count grow, in coordination with the COO and other Ops teams Manage the Special Project Managers directly: weekly 1:1s, performance and feedback, coaching and professional development Watch for capacity strain and wellbeing issues on the team before they become a problem Handle skip-levels and interpersonal issues, and know when to loop in People & Culture Support Quality and Experience Ensure SP’s processes are documented and standardized — onboarding, offboarding, financial reporting, risk review — so growth doesn't depend on tacit knowledge Set and track OKRs for the team Keep SP's relationships with funders, project directors, and other RP departments strong Make sure project directors are genuinely satisfied with the support they're getting