Research Operations Assistant

About Us

At Founders Pledge, our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to do immense good with their charitable giving. Since launching in 2015, our community of over 2,300 members has pledged nearly $13.6B and donated $1.8B+ to the charitable sector in 45+ countries.

We provide end-to-end giving infrastructure, pioneering research, and access to a global network of experts. In other words, we help tech leaders become strategic philanthropists. Our members include founders and leaders behind companies such as Airbnb, UiPath, Dropbox, Skype, Spotify, and Uber.

We focus on deploying capital where it can achieve the greatest impact, guided by evidence, careful analysis, and long-term thinking.

Salary: Up to $90,000 depending on experience

About the Role

Founders Pledge primarily funds high-impact opportunities through direct donations from our members, or through our themed Funds. Growing and effectively managing these Funds is a massive priority for us. They allow us to deploy capital quickly in time-sensitive moments, leverage deep domain expertise, and unlock additional resources through innovative funding mechanisms.

As our Funds play a larger role in how we move capital and shape new solutions, we need a dedicated Research Operations Assistant to take on the operational weight behind them - supporting our Fund Managers and research leads, keeping fund operations running smoothly, and keeping information flowing flawlessly across our teams.

Reporting to our Research Operations Lead, your time will be spent providing operational and administrative support that frees our Fund Managers and research leads to focus on their core work, and helps our team scale their impact. Alongside that, you’ll take real ownership of the operations behind our Funds - the area where you’ll build and demonstrate the skills to lead operations yourself.

What you’ll do:

Each fund is currently managed by a dedicated Fund Manager, focused on growth enablement and execution. As Research Operations Assistant, you’ll primarily provide administrative and operations support with a focus area in fund operations.

1. Administrative and Operational Support

The larger share of your time will be spent providing operational and administrative support to our Fund Managers, our research leads, and the Research Operations Lead, allowing them to focus on their primary responsibilities.

• Calendar and inbox support: email drafting and management (including prioritization support) and scheduling meetings, so the people you support spend their time where it counts.

• Meeting, travel, and event logistics: helping prepare for meetings, conferences, and follow-ups, as well as booking flights, hotels, and meeting rooms.

• Operational support: assist the Research Operations Lead by taking on repeatable, process-driven work, building operational and organizational fluency along the way.

• Keep our records in order: maintain the trackers, shared documents, and internal records the research team relies on, so everyone is working from a single accurate picture.

• Manage competing asks: requests will come from several senior colleagues at once. You’ll work with the Research Operations Lead to build and run a system for triaging them.

2. Own Fund Operations

Alongside that support, you’ll take ownership of the operational process behind our Funds - making fund fundraising seamless, moving money efficiently, and tracking the metrics that drive growth. This is the part of the role where you’ll practice and demonstrate operations leadership. To achieve this, you’ll:

• Build and scale our systems: Take our current ad-hoc processes and replace them with centralized, robust tracking systems for quantitative and qualitative fund data (commitments, capital inflows/outflows, and fund performance). You’ll identify operational bottlenecks and recommend improvements to aid fund scalability.

• Streamline grantmaking mechanics: Co-own the end-to-end coordination of Fund operations - including grant tracking, timelines, committee coordination, approvals, and disbursements - so our Research team and Fund Managers can stay focused on their core work.

• Track the pipeline and surface risks: Help map and balance our donor pipeline against our research pipeline of High-Impact Funding Opportunities (HIFOs), ensuring capital supply smoothly matches disbursement demand, and proactively surface risks to senior leadership (e.g. delays in research sign-off, capital shortfalls, execution constraints).

• Coordinate with external partners and funders: Be a point of contact for organisations we fund or co-fund, handling routine coordination such as requesting updates and reporting inputs.

• Respond to ad hoc requests: You’ll also manage one-off donor and funder requests including tailored reporting, special conditions, or agreement-related obligations as well as working with our Impact Analytics team so that we deliver on our promises.

• Bridge the gap to Communications: Act as the operational connective tissue to ensure fund materials, external posts, internal memos, and impact reports are accurate, timely, and aligned. You won’t create these materials yourself, but will collaborate to ensure our communications assist our disbursement targets.

• Support high-stakes launches: Coordinate internal functional areas to execute fund launches and reopenings. To start, you’ll dive right into helping to project manage the relaunch of our Animal Welfare Fund.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone with operations experience, ideally with exposure to philanthropy or the non-profit sector. You’re someone who loves optimization, gets satisfaction from making things run smoothly, and has the confidence to improve systems rather than just maintaining the status quo. You’re ambitious about growing as an operator, and you understand this path requires doing the groundwork well.

You’ll have:

• Operational experience: You have experience managing or supporting operations, multi-stakeholder projects, or data-heavy processes - ideally in grantmaking, consulting, or a fast-moving nonprofit environment.

• A systems-builder mindset: You don’t wait for a process to be given to you. You’re comfortable with the tools that underpin this work (like Salesforce, Notion, Asana, or Google Workspace) and know how to use them to reduce organizational friction.

• High attention to detail: You know that in grantmaking, a small error in tracking or disbursement directly erodes donor trust. You take pride in flawless accuracy.

• Clear, proactive communication: You can hold many threads at once, write well to colleagues and external partners alike, and proactively surface risks before they become bottlenecks.

• Comfort operating with ambiguity and shifting priorities: you can handle multiple projects and stakeholders at once and manage directional changes with ease. You initiate ways to help instead of waiting to be told.

• A willingness to do unglamorous work: A significant part of this role is administrative. You’re happy doing that work well because you can see what it unlocks for the people around you.

Bonus points:

• Ecosystem experience: it’s preferred if you have direct experience working with philanthropic Funds, in grantmaking operations, philanthropic services or a foundation/donor-advised fund context. You already understand how capital moves in our ecosystem.

Location and Travel Requirements

This role is based in NY, with at least one day in the office.

Some travel comes with the job. Teams usually get together at least once a year, and all staff attend our annual global offsite in the UK.

Application Deadline

Applications will be accepted until EOD 11th October 2026.

Why Work With Us?

This role is a real opportunity to help build something meaningful. You'll work with a small, focused team of people who care deeply about what we do and how we do it, and you'll have real responsibility for shaping the success of our thematic Funds and ensuring money is moved to the highest-impact funding opportunities, from day one.

You can find more about the benefits we offer here, but what makes Founders Pledge genuinely special is the combination of mission and people. We're a diverse team, from both charitable and commercial backgrounds, who believe remarkable things happen when people tackle hard problems together. We offer a flat structure, real ownership, and a chance to help shape the future of strategic philanthropy.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at Founders Pledge. We seek people with different strengths, experiences, and backgrounds who share our drive to understand and solve complex social challenges. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Finding solutions to the world's most pressing problems requires different perspectives and unique ways of thinking, and we are committed to building a workplace where everyone can do their best work.

If you're excited about our mission but don't meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply.