Senior Research Manager - Animal Welfare

About the role

Rethink Priorities' Animal Welfare Department produces research and strategic advice to help organizations make well-informed decisions for animals. The Department is splitting into three teams. The AI and Animals Team helps organisations navigate an AI-transforming world. The Frontiers Team advances the field of animal welfare, focusing on neglected animals (such as shrimp) and emerging topics (such as breeding for welfare). And a new Animal Welfare Strategy Team, described below.

The Animal Welfare Strategy Team (working name) will focus on supporting and accelerating funders and organizations toward achieving their core goals of accelerating the end of low-welfare farming and reducing the suffering of animals on farms, with a focus on terrestrial vertebrates. This will involve a mix of consulting work, in-house research, and other activities.

• Recent consulting work has included economic analysis of egg prices for a policy advocacy organization, prioritization of welfare-tech ideas for a venture studio, and research on alternative-protein regulation to guide a large grantmaker with a $10m+ portfolio. RP is independent: clients get the answers that the evidence supports, whether or not they are the ones they hoped for.

• In-house research might involve building data tools and resources to map where animals are suffering on farms, or strategic analysis to guide stakeholders' decisions.

• The team will also run the annual Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, which brings together leaders from across the animal welfare landscape. Going forward, it may build capacity for other actions to enable the success for existing and new projects, such as regranting or talent programs.

The department seeks to hire a Senior Research Manager to lead this new Animal Welfare Strategy Team. This is a leadership role in a Department that is growing and being restructured. You will need to work with the Director to set a strategy for this team covering how the team prioritizes projects, and how the team measures and maximizes impact for the animals. We are looking for someone excited to build these structures. You will also work on hiring, managing incoming consulting projects, designing research processes, and managing staff. We want to create a team with a mix of cross-cutting skills, such as economics, policy, animal welfare ecosystem knowledge, stakeholder management, M&E, and animal science. We have 1–2 economist staff ready to join this team.

This role will report to Sam Hilton, Acting Director of the Animal Welfare Department.

Ideal start date: Monday 4th January 2027

Key Responsibilities

You are responsible for leading the team's areas of work. This includes:

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Manage consulting intake. Decide which requests from funders, advocacy organizations, and entrepreneurs RP takes on, reshapes, or declines.

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Identify opportunities and act on them. Bring forward ideas with outsized upside, research or otherwise. For research, set an agenda of priority projects. For other interventions, such as regranting or talent programs, decide whether RP should run them and launch what clears the bar.

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Oversee the Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum. Ensure your team: sets the agenda, decides who is in the room, and turns the movement's annual leaders' gathering into decisions and impact.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will include:

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Set strategy. Decide how this team prioritizes, how it measures impact and what work it takes on. There is no project prioritization process, impact framework or intake system yet – you will build them alongside the Director.

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Hire. Decide which skills the team needs next: policy, M&E, animal science, movement experience. Run the rounds, supported by RP's in-house recruitment specialist.

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Manage the team. Lead economists and specialists with deeper expertise than yours in their own fields. Set the quality bar. Put in place research processes, review standards and project tracking.

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Deliver research that gets used. Scope clients' decisions, manage staff to deliver on deadline, and follow up on whether clients acted on the findings.

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Represent RP. Build the networks and relationships that generate new projects. Attend conferences where you are able to travel.

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Fundraise. With the Development Team's support, raise additional funds as the team grows.

What We Are Looking For

Essential criteria

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Impact first. Driven to have as much impact for animals as possible. Committed to integrity in research, to following the evidence, and to being transparent about what it shows.

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Decision-oriented research experience. Experience conducting or overseeing research aimed at informing or influencing a specific stakeholder's decision.

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Good judgment. Demonstrated judgment in prioritization and decision-making under uncertainty.

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Management experience. Experience managing or mentoring others, including people with deeper expertise than yours, or clear readiness to step into a people-management role.

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Strategy and process design. Experience of, or clear ability to set a team's strategy and build processes to deliver it where none existed.

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Research review skills. Ability to interrogate both qualitative and quantitative analysis you did not produce, and to "think at the margin" about cost-effectiveness.

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Communication skills. Excellent reasoning transparency: ability to show the assumptions and evidence behind your conclusions. Strong ability to synthesize complex information and communicate strategic insight in writing and in person.

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Delivery. Track record of getting projects finished, on deadline, involving other people. Works well and makes autonomous decisions in a remote, asynchronous, international environment.

Desirable criteria

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Consulting experience. Consulting or other client-facing analytical work: identifying the decision a client is actually facing, shaping or declining work accordingly, and building relationships with clients and fundraising leads.

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Experience of the animal organizational landscape. Professional or voluntary experience of animal advocacy. A working knowledge of the organizational landscape, funders, and strategic debates.

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In-depth expertise in a relevant area. Such as economics, policy and regulation, M&E, or animal science.

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Events and convening experience. Running convenings or facilitating events that bring together groups with differing interests.

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Talent development experience. Running talent programs or fellowships.

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Grantmaking experience. Distributing funds and evaluating organizations for funding.

We expect that even highly qualified applicants will not meet all of these criteria. We encourage you to apply even if you do not have some of these skills, knowledge and experiences.

What We Offer

Compensation

• We offer an annual salary within the following ranges for a full-time position, prorated for part-time work:

• $98,500 - $125,000 USD pre-tax

• £76,590 - £97,176 GBP pre-tax

• €89,459 - €113,527 EUR pre-tax

• Compensation is not restricted to the currencies listed above.

• The exact salary will be based on the candidate’s title level, and calculated using RP’s salary algorithm. Towards the upper end we would expect a track record of leading a research team to drive impact. Towards the lower end we would expect strong research judgment with a shorter management record, or management experience but weaker research skills. You do not need to say which end you think you fit; we assess this from your application.

• To ensure fairness across the entire organization, RP does not negotiate salaries.

Other Benefits

• Opportunity to contribute to a fast-growing, high-impact organization — our research is used by key decision-makers who influence the distribution of hundreds of millions of charitable dollars.

• Remote-first environment, including flexible work hours and schedule. Virtual co-working spaces, including a private Rethink Priorit