Program Manager, Wildlife Technology Fund

Organization
Renaissance Philanthropy
Location
Washington, D.C., with in-office work required 2-3 days per week.
Job Type
Full-time
Deadline for Applications
11/01/2026
How to Apply
Follow the link
Where to Apply
https://www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/careers/program-manager-wildlife-technology-fund?utm_source=probablygood_board
Tags
Full-time

Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit with a mission to fuel a 21st-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists and innovators. The organization builds time-bound, thesis-driven philanthropic funds to support ideas that advance entire fields. Renaissance Philanthropy has a proven track record of partnerships with global funders and organizations across the private and public sectors, including The Walton Family Foundation, Coefficient Giving, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), and Germany’s SPRIND. In its first two years, it has catalyzed $533M for science, innovation, and technology, including $268M in funding raised for initiatives housed at Renaissance Philanthropy and $265M of funding unlocked directly for other organizations.

Job Description
As a Program Manager for the Wildlife Technology Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, you will be responsible for scoping, designing, and — if the case holds up — launching a multi-year program, working across scientific disciplines to achieve concrete, wildlife-benefitting outcomes in a 3-5 year timespan. We are seeking to add up to three program leads to the team; program leads report to the Director, Wildlife Technology Fund.

You will operate with unusual autonomy inside a small, high-performing team. You will also be an early member of a fund that intends to launch several such programs over the coming years, so we are looking for candidates who want to help build the wider project, not only run one program within it.

Background on the Wildlife Technology Fund
The Wildlife Technology Fund looks for problems where the case for animals and the case for people point in the same direction — where interventions that would help millions or billions of animals could also protect crops, prevent diseases, avert biodiversity loss, or offer significant economic benefits. Problems with this profile are more common than people expect, and they are systematically neglected: too applied for basic-science funders, too early and unglamorous for commercial R&D, too technical for wildlife NGOs, and too obscure for governments.

This role does not come with a single predetermined problem. We have identified several potential programs, and we are equally interested in a strong candidate who arrives with their own ideas.

Resolving the ecology of bird–window collisions. Building a welfare-focused understanding of bird-window collisions: investigating rates and degree of impact of different sub-lethal outcomes, the degree to which these mortalities affect abundance over time, and how changes in bird numbers affect the wellbeing of other animals.

Wildlife vaccination. Developing a framework to prioritize amongst potential wildlife diseases, including consideration of downstream ecological effects, and judging whether a research program could realistically deliver an affordable vaccine.

Vulture conservation. Investigating how vulture population recovery affects the spread of disease in both people and wildlife, weighing the potential for unexpected ecological impacts, and assessing potential interventions in terms of effectiveness and cost.

Reducing reliance on managed pollinators. Investigating the feasibility of robotic, mechanical, or alternative pollination strategies as a method of replacing managed honeybees as commercial pollinators, or alternative strategies for improving the cost and welfare of pollination services.

Advancing wild animal welfare indicators. Pushing the assessment of wildlife welfare forward through a coordinated push to develop indicators that work across a broad taxonomic group, can be deployed in the field at reasonable cost, and integrate welfare over a meaningful fraction of a lifespan.

Your idea. We are interested in receiving proposals from candidates that complement this portfolio. A candidate proposal should roughly meet the following criteria:

It plausibly affects animals at a scale of hundreds of millions or more.

It has a real non-welfare constituency — public health, agriculture, conservation, biosecurity, or straightforward economics — who would want the result on their own terms.

It sits in an appropriate state of technological or innovation readiness: past basic discovery, short of commercial viability, and blocked at least in part by coordination.

This position is based in Washington, D.C., with in-office work required 2-3 days per week. A relocation benefit would be considered for the right candidate.

We offer a full healthcare package and 5% 401(k) contribution. The base salary range(s) for this role are as follows:

$110,000 – $145,000

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.