Immigration Specialist (Closed)

Effective Ventures Operations (EV Ops) is looking for an Immigration Specialist to help its operations team and fiscally sponsored organisations secure visas.

As an immigration specialist, you’ll ensure that key organisations in the effective altruism (EA) and longtermism communities continue to recruit talent globally. You’ll be the point of contact and coordinator for visas and will work closely with our Staff Support team and legal counsel.

The role can be entry-level but previous immigration experience is preferred. This role may be a good fit for you if you’re motivated, altruistic, and optimistic.

EV Ops aims to provide world-class operational support to organisations that are expected to have an outsized positive impact. We do this by providing the financial, legal, administrative, grantmaking, logistical, and fundraising support that enables many high-impact organisations to grow, including: CEA, 80,000 Hours, the Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, Giving What We Can, the Centre for the Governance of AI, Longview Philanthropy, Asterisk, and Non-trivial.

The project and the role

We’re looking for motivated, altruistic, and optimistic people from diverse backgrounds to join us in this impactful work. You’ll work closely with our Head of Staff Support, Andrew Leeke, and the Staff Support team.

The role will grow as you develop, but you’ll start out by focusing on the following key responsibilities:

• Keep EV’s UK sponsor licence up-to-date and compliant
• Apply for Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS)
• Submit visa amendments to lawyers to maintain existing visas
• Maintain regular communications between EV Ops, visa applicants, and legal counsel
• Stay abreast of relevant changes to immigration policies and procedures in the UK and US
• Request, and act on, visa applicant feedback
• Minimise friction and increase automation around the visa process
• Keep data in sync between various HR systems
• Maintain mandatory visa records in preparation for audits

The ideal candidate

This role will suit an ambitious professional with experience processing visas who can own and improve processes within the Staff Support team. We’re also open to those with previous experience in (people) operations and other backgrounds. Less experienced candidates must be able to demonstrate excellent potential to learn and develop quickly. Within the first few months, we expect you to get up to speed on complex and critical HR systems and processes.

The ideal candidate will be:

• Detail-oriented: You’ll be dealing with sensitive HR records, so you need a keen eye for inconsistencies and errors.
• Highly organised: You’ll be tracking several concurrent projects, prioritising effectively, and directing attention to what’s most important.
• Proactive: You’ll anticipate issues before they arise, and suggest improvements to existing processes.
• Solution-oriented: You’ll consider and suggest solutions whenever raising a problem within the team or other staff.
• Passionate about systems: You’ll look to automate your work wherever possible.
• Excited to provide an excellent service: You’ll treat staff across the organisations as “customers,” in the sense that you’ll attend to their visa experience.
• An excellent communicator: You’ll need to write clearly to limit back-and-forth dialogue, concisely to save staff time, and empathetically to make staff feel considered.

Salary and benefits

This is a full-time role, reporting to Andrew Leeke, Head of Staff Support. We prefer candidates who can work from an EA hub in either London or Oxford. However, we’re open to remote work for the right candidate.

Your starting salary range is £65,000 to £80,000, depending on prior experience and location. There may be flexibility in salary for exceptional candidates with significant experience.

Our benefits reflect our belief in investing in our people to build the strongest possible team. We want everyone to be able to perform at their best as we provide world-class support and maximise our positive impact.

• Prioritised health & wellbeing: We provide private medical, vision and dental insurance, up to 3 weeks’ paid sick leave, and a mental health allowance of £5,000 each year.
• Flexible working: You’re generally free to set your own schedule (with some overlapping hours with colleagues) and choose to work remotely or from our office at Trajan House in Oxford, UK.
• World-class work environment: Our Oxford office, Trajan House, comes with free vegan food, high-quality vegan caterers, a gym and supplements, showers, monitors and other ergonomic equipment to boost your productivity, along with the opportunity to network with people working there.
• Generous vacation: We provide all team members with 25 days’ holiday each year, plus bank (public) holidays.
• Professional development opportunities: We offer a £5,000 allowance each year and build in opportunities for career growth through on-the-job learning, increasing responsibility, and role progression pathways.
• Parental leave and support: New parents have up to 14 weeks fully-paid leave and up to 52 weeks leave in total. We also provide financial support for child care to help parents balance child care needs.
• Pension and income protection plans: We offer a 10% employer / 0% employee pension or retirement contribution, and income protection insurance.
• Equipment to help your productivity: We will pay for high-quality and ergonomic equipment (laptop, monitors, chair, etc.), in the office or at home if you work remotely.
• Global team retreats: As we are a remote team, we hold in-person staff retreats twice a year to work on our plans and build strong working relationships.

Equivalent benefits are offered in different locations.

Our values

Our work is shaped by our core values:

We’re focused on excellent customer service

• We solve problems for our customers before they’re aware of them
• We proactively seek, and take action on, feedback
• We respond to requests politely, quickly, and helpfully

We’re protective of our attention

• We prioritise effectively, focusing on highest expected value
• We design systems to prevent recurring problems
• We take on new organisations and projects deliberately, and we’re comfortable saying no

We’re ambitious with our impact

• We adapt our systems when the expected value is high
• We carefully consider tradeoffs such as opportunity costs, benefits, and risks
• We take on organisations and projects that will change the world

Apply

We’re looking for someone to start in November 2022 and will review applications on a rolling basis.

After considering your written application, we may invite you to complete a short trial task followed by further interviews. We’ll invite finalists to provide references and participate in a multi-day paid work trial.

We’re happy to consider applicants from overseas and may consider sponsorship if needed. EV Ops serves a global community, and our team works with people and organisations all over the world. We’re committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, and we encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from women, gender minorities, and people of colour who are excited about contributing to our mission. We’re an equal opportunity employer.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact careers@ev.org