Operations Generalist

Open Cages is looking for an Operations Generalist to join their team.

Overview:

• Full-time position
• Language: English
• Location: Remote in the UK
• Salary: £39,695 per year
• Applications closing: 4th May

Job Description

We are an organisation fighting animal suffering. We are part of an international organisation, Anima International, and since 2018, we oppose animal cruelty in the UK. To achieve our goal we use scientific evidence, careful reasoning, and draw upon decades of collective experience. Just in the last few years, we have successfully helped improve the lives of hundreds of millions of farmed animals in the UK.

We are a small and ambitious early-stage organisation with two full-time team members. Our current objective: to help the 1 billion chickens raised annually in the UK. By joining us as our first employee focussed on operations, you will help lay the foundations of the organisation as it prepares for rapid scaling, not only increasing our impact for animals now but by also helping to shape the organisation we want to become. If you have an engineering mindset, like to organise things (ideally in spreadsheets), and navigate through novel problems, it’s time to use your strengths for animals. Whilst it may sound challenging, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of making a historic change for those who cannot stand up for themselves. Someone has to pick up that challenge, and we hope it will be You.

To help the billions of animals trapped on factory farms, we need an organisation that is expertly designed and not weighed down by inefficiencies. In this role your first task will be to help us manage, monitor and speed up our internal processes such as accounting, finances, payments, staff operations, donor management and event planning.

Responsibilities

As an Operations Generalist at Open Cages, you will:

• Build culture – you will help build and reinforce our culture, so we never lose what makes up the strength of Open Cages.
• Embrace reality – you will make it your mission to understand the world as it is rather than as you would like it to be.
• Manage activists – you will manage and work with teams of both employed and voluntary activists.
• Experience frustration – you will feel frustrated about things you could do better or things that are not working in the organisation or your team, and use this frustration as an opportunity to refine and elevate our organisation.
• Question ideas – you will question common knowledge, especially your own ideas, so that our results are always as good as they can be.
• Optimise your performance – you will continuously deepen your knowledge – both about particular areas of animal advocacy and about how the world works – and enjoy this process.
• Prioritise action – you will act even when there is not sufficient data.
• Abandon projects – you will change your objectives when it makes sense, no matter the time already invested.
• Respect and trust others – you will be there for others and trust their intentions. You will support them when they succeed and when they fail.
• Seek information independently – you will be responsible for acting very independently which will require you to obtain and verify data.
• Make mistakes – you will embrace your mistakes without being ashamed with the desire to learn from them.
• Oversee employment – you will oversee payroll, staff contracts, and employment matters and payments.
• Manage and optimise finances – you will be in charge of our income and expenses. This will include making sure that we have efficient and accurate accounting, and that we have enough income to achieve our goals.
• Help ensure legal governance – you will help submit our annual accounts to the charity commission and ensure compliance with all legal duties, such as making tax payments.
• Manage supporters – you will handle communication with our supporter base and manage donors, primarily through email.
• Improve team coordination – you will worry about how to make the team more effective and help us work better together by improving structure, tools, and internal processes.
• Build and improve tools – you will spot inefficiencies and opportunities in our processes – such as our newsletter and payments software – and improve them, for example by building automation tools.
• Plan events – you will handle logistics and planning for internal and external events such as recruitments, training, and team building activities.
• Obsess over speed – your job will not be to simply manage internal operations, but to reduce the organisation’s time spent on them so that it becomes faster and more efficient.

Role Requirements

We are looking for:

• Strong belief in the mission of our organisation. Working for us should not be thought of as a ‘career step’. We want people who are motivated by our mission above all.
• Flexible availability. We think of ourselves as a small startup. The fate of the organisation rests on a handful of highly motivated advocates who want to do something ambitious with their lives. We want to maintain the intensity of our current operating culture, so you should expect to work the occasional weekends and late evenings.
• Not being an asshole. We expect you to treat others with respect, decency and compassion – even the occasional adversaries.
• A preference for hard work. Activism is our passion and one of the main motivations in life. To fit our culture, you have to be a person that is proactive and enjoys work.
• Growth mindset. Nobody knows how to fix the world, so we need you to keep learning. We constantly strive to be better at our activism, but also as people.
• Strong interest in a high-feedback culture. We have a culture of honest and direct communication. We talk openly about our strengths and weaknesses on a daily basis because we want to be the best. You will know what your colleagues really think of you and be encouraged to speak your mind.
• Ability to reason and communicate your thinking, especially in a written form. In order to thrive in our organisation you must be able to think carefully, try to back up your ideas with reasonable evidence, and above all be open to being proven wrong and changing your mind.
• Fluency in English. You will be working in a UK-based organisation which will require constant communication with English speakers.
• Ability to work in the UK. This offer is open to candidates who are either currently UK-based, or are willing to move to the UK for the job. We are happy to do whatever we can to help you in relocating, depending on your needs and our ability. If you have any questions about what we can help with, don’t hesitate to write to us!

You do not need to be vegan or vegetarian. While all of our events provide only plant-based meals, we are open to anyone who wants to fight for a world that is free from animal suffering. We won’t turn down any help.

How to apply?

To apply for this position, please fill in the application form.

What will help you go through the recruitment process successfully?

• Familiarity with Effective Altruism principles.
• Studying our recommended materials list (see below).
• Attending the webinar we are hosting (see below).
• Some familiarity with automation and LLMs, though this is not required.

List of materials that will help you get this job

To help you progress through the stages in our recruitment process, we have prepared a list of materials. They will be especially useful for those who do not meet our requirements or lack either experience in animal advocacy or role-specific expertise. However, we encourage all candidates to read them. The list also includes webinars recorded by our staff so you can learn more about our organisation and recruitment process.

Webinars

We will be hosting webinars (with live Q&A sessions) so you can ask us all the questions you may have about Open Cages, working with us, the position and the recruitment process. You can submit your questions in advance here or ask them yourself during the meeting.

Click on the links below to join (our webinars will be hosted on Zoom video conferencing platform). We will post a link to the recording for people who couldn’t attend, so you can revisit this page later on to watch it.