Funds Program Manager

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 $1.9B+ 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 DOE

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 Funds Program Manager, who will be the central engine room for our Fund Managers - taking on the operational weight of fundraising execution, fixing data workflows, and keeping information flowing flawlessly across our teams.

Reporting to our Research Operations Lead, we’re looking for someone adept at operations who can build, implement and improve robust systems, ensuring our funding infrastructure matches our global ambition. You’ll also provide operational and administrative support to our Fund Managers and the research team, to help our team scale their impact.

What You’ll Do

Each fund is currently managed by a dedicated Fund Manager, focused on growth enablement and execution. As Funds Program Manager, you’ll have three primary focus areas:

1. Own Fundraising Operations & Data Systems

Your main goal will be to make the operational process of fund fundraising entirely seamless, moving money efficiently and tracking the metrics that drive growth. 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 all quantitative and qualitative fund data (commitments, capital inflows/outflows, and fund performance). You’ll identify strategic or operational bottlenecks and recommend improvements to aid fund scalability.

• Master the pipeline metrics: Pull data out of silos. You’ll map and balance our donor pipeline against our research pipeline of High-Impact Funding Opportunities (HIFOs) - ensuring capital supply smoothly matches disbursement demand.

• 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/Fund Managers spend zero unnecessary time on admin.

• Anticipate bottlenecks: You’ll proactively surface risks to senior leadership (e.g. delays in research sign-off, capital shortfalls, execution constraints).

• Manage one-off donor and funder requests: This could include tailored reporting, special conditions, or agreement-related obligations, ensuring responsiveness and follow-through.

2. Drive Internal Coordination & Information Flow

You’ll eliminate any operational friction between our Fund Managers, Research teams, and the public-facing Communications and Member Experience teams.

• 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.

• Manage donor commitments: Work closely with our Impact Analytics team to coordinate external reporting, smoothly managing one-off donor requests and special conditions so that we deliver flawlessly on our promises.

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

3. Provide Administrative and Operational Support

Some of your time will be spent providing operational and administrative support to Fund Managers to allow them to focus on their primary responsibilities.

• Administrative support: this work may include email drafting and management (including prioritization support), scheduling meetings, 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.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone with operations experience, ideally in the field of philanthropy or non-profits. You’re someone who loves optimization, gets satisfaction from making things run smoothly, and has the confidence to implement new systems rather than just maintaining the status quo.

You’ll have:

• Operational experience: You bring significant experience managing complex operations, multi-stakeholder projects or data pipelines - ideally in grantmaking, consulting, or a fast-moving nonprofit environment.

• Ecosystem experience: 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.

• A systems-builder mindset: You don't wait for a process to be given to you. You’re highly fluent 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, translate messy pipeline data into clean insights, and proactively surface risks to leadership before they become bottlenecks.

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

Location and Travel Requirements

This role is based in either NY or SF, with one day in the office.

Occasional travel may be required for team offsites (once per year), and all staff are expected to attend a global offsite annually.

Application Deadline

Applications will be accepted until EOD 14th September.

Why Work With Us?

You can find more about the benefits we offer here, but what makes us truly special is both our mission and our people.

We’re a diverse team, from both charitable and commercial backgrounds, who believe that amazing things can happen when we tackle problems together.

We offer a flat structure and an opportunity to help shape the future of 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, color, 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 an inclusive and diverse 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.