(Senior) Program Officer, Neglected Animals

This role is offered at either the Program Officer or the Senior Program Officer level. The salary range covers multiple seniority steps across these levels, and where an offer falls will depend on your experience and performance during the selection process. See "Levels and compensation" below. We may be open to hiring two people in this round.

To apply, please click "Apply Now" to respond to the initial questions in the application form and attach your CV. We ask that you spend no more than 90 minutes preparing your responses to the prompts.

Application Deadline: Sunday, October 11,2026, end of day (23:59) Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12:00).

Note Before Applying: We invite anyone who is interested in this role to apply, and will assess applications primarily on anonymized responses to the application prompts, so please ensure they represent your fit for the position well. We also ask candidates to attach their CV: it will not be scored, but we will use it later in the process for verification. Please do not include a cover letter, photograph or headshot, or any personal information not relevant to the role (including marital status, age, identity traits). Please also do not ask staff involved in the hiring process to meet with you — to ensure fairness, such requests will be declined.

Contact: Please email if you have any questions.

About the Position

Rethink Priorities' Animal Welfare Department advances evidence-based and reason-driven change for animals. Within it, the Neglected Animals Program works on animals that are overlooked relative to how many of them there are — farmed invertebrates and wild animals. These are populations counted in the hundreds of billions and upwards, almost entirely outside the scope of existing animal welfare protections, and receiving a tiny fraction of the attention directed at farmed vertebrates.

We are looking for a Program Officer or Senior Program Officer to take a substantial share of this program's work and run with it, primarily focused on terrestrial invertebrate welfare — both farmed and wild.

The program's bottleneck is finding out which questions matter, getting them investigated by the most appropriate talent, and ensuring the analysis is acted upon. Sometimes that means doing the research in-house. But often it means finding and managing the right contractor, or convening the handful of organizations working on a particular problem.

Where your time would go. Roughly half your time on farmed terrestrial invertebrates and half on wild ones. The balance will shift as opportunities move. The wild side of this work is at an earlier stage of strategic development than the farmed side. In the future, this role could expand to cover other wild animals.

Key responsibilities and the types of tasks involved in the role

~35% Analysis and intervention evaluation — decision-oriented analysis that lets aligned funders and organizations make better calls.

• Run a shallow intervention review: go from a loosely specified idea to a defensible recommendation on whether it is worth pursuing, within a fixed time budget.

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Identify and interview experts on questions that academic and gray literature cannot answer.

• Conduct analysis of a production system — its economics, cost, and whether it can plausibly be commercially viable at scale — or write the specification for a contractor to build one and quality-assure what they deliver.

• Analyze published financial disclosures to understand a company's or a sector's trajectory, rather than relying on media reports or press releases.

~30% Commissioning and overseeing external work — commissioning work, convening the field, and incubating new efforts where nothing suitable exists.

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Scope, commission and manage an external contractor or consultancy, including in a region where we currently have no in-house presence — and decide when to stop work that isn't delivering.

~25% Stakeholder engagement and coordination — building the relationships that let well-informed decisions actually get made.

• Help organize a coordination event that brings together the organizations working on a shared problem, and follow through on what was agreed.

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Write and present an update for a funder on what a project has achieved, what it has not, and what you would do differently.

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Present your work at a conference and build relationships with others working in the field.

~10% Strategy and opportunity identification — Bringing forward new opportunities, and honestly assessing which of the program's current bets are not working.

• Take an idea that someone has floated, evaluate it honestly, and either run with it or kill it.

• Exercise judgment about information sensitivity — some of this program's work requires discretion about what is shared, with whom, and when.

What sorts of topics you would work on

To get a sense of the kind of question you would investigate, see the executive summaries of:

• Investments into insect farming

• Can black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) producers displace fishmeal?

• Database of near-term interventions for wild animals

• Forecasting farmed animal numbers in 2033

You are also welcome to browse our full research database.

Note that not all our work in this space is openly published.

Levels and compensation

The salary range ($79,000 – $98,500 USD pre-tax) covers more than one seniority step. Toward the upper end of the range we would expect more of the following:

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Autonomy — running projects with minimal oversight, and taking the initiative to learn tasks you have not done before.

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Judgment we lean on — program leadership consulting you on which projects are worth taking on at all, not just how to execute them.

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A track record of moving decision-makers — analysis aimed at changing what someone outside your own organization actually does, where you elicited their needs early and shaped the output around them.

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Independent stakeholder relationships — being trusted as a counterpart in your own right by people outside RP.

Toward the lower end of the range we would expect strong analytical capability and clear evidence of potential, with less of a track record behind it — we would expect to coach you on commissioning external work and on building relationships in the field. Toward the upper end we would expect you to arrive already able to do both, and we would lean on your judgment about which projects are worth taking on at all. You do not need to signal which end you think you fit; we assess that from your answers.

This role does not currently include line management of RP staff, and would not involve running hiring rounds or performance reviews — though you would manage contractors and external partners. At the Senior Program Officer level, line management responsibilities may be introduced in future.

What We Are Looking For

Essential criteria

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Analytical judgment under time pressure. You can take a vague but important question, scope it sensibly, identify critical assumptions, choose a defensible method, and reach a usable answer by a deadline — rather than an exhaustive answer late.

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Getting work done through other people. You have specified a piece of work for someone else to deliver — a contractor, consultant, agency, or a team outside your own — held them to it, and formed your own view about whether what came back was good enough to act on.

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Quantitative reasoning. You are comfortable building, interrogating and explaining simple models. You can produce quick back-of-the-envelope calculations, and you are comfortable articulating confidence in assumptions or beliefs using numbers as well as words.

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Clear written communication for decision-makers. You can explain a chain of reasoning — premises, inferences, and where it might be wrong — to an intelligent reader who is not a specialist and who does not have much time.

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Comfort with deep uncertainty. You can give a caveated but genuinely decision-useful a