How to apply for Product Lead

About Centre for Effective Altruism

The Centre for Effective Altruism is a nonprofit that supports and coordinates the effective altruism movement and community. It builds tools and services, like this curated job board, to help people find high-impact career opportunities across global causes. Working here means your product decisions are tied directly to whether people get placed into roles that aim to do the most good.

About the role

You will lead product strategy and execution for a curated job board that connects people to high-impact career opportunities. The work spans design and feature iteration, hands-on shipping, marketing channel testing, and building tracking systems to measure placements and conversion. You also get to explore bigger bets like logged-in experiences, CV matching, and AI career advisors, and decide which ones to pursue.

A typical day

You might review placement and conversion data, then ship a design or feature improvement to the job board yourself or with engineers. Later you could set up a paid ads or SEO experiment, define success criteria, and check tracking to see whether the board is driving placements. You may also spend time exploring larger product opportunities and deciding which bets to pursue next.

Who Centre for Effective Altruism is looking for

• Has led product strategy and execution end-to-end, including shipping improvements hands-on or directing engineers.
• Can run marketing experiments across paid ads, SEO, email, and social, and scale the most cost-effective acquisition channels.
• Builds tracking and evaluation systems to measure placements, conversion rates, retention, and user outcomes.
• Comfortable running experiments with clear success criteria across a theory of change, from traffic growth to placement rates.
• Can evaluate larger product opportunities such as logged-in experiences, CV matching, or AI career advisors and decide which bets to pursue.

Tips for this application

• Show a concrete example of a product you led where you shipped improvements hands-on or via engineers, and state the placement or conversion metric you moved.
• Describe a marketing experiment you ran across paid ads, SEO, email, or social, including the cost per acquisition and how you scaled the winning channel.
• Explain how you built tracking to measure whether a product drove real outcomes, not just traffic, and what you learned from the data.
• Name one larger product bet you would explore for this job board (for example CV matching or an AI career advisor) and how you would decide whether to pursue it.
• Reference the Centre for Effective Altruism's role as a nonprofit supporting the effective altruism movement, and connect your product work to placements into high-impact roles.

What to cover in your cover letter

Focus on your experience leading product strategy and execution for a job board or similar two-sided marketplace. Describe how you iterated design, features, and curation to increase discovery and placements. Detail a marketing channel test you ran and how you scaled the most cost-effective acquisition strategy. Explain how you built tracking and evaluation systems to measure placements, conversion rates, and retention, and how you used experiments with clear success criteria to validate impact.

Research before applying

• Read the Centre for Effective Altruism's website to understand how it supports and coordinates the effective altruism movement and community.
• Explore the curated job board itself: note its design, features, curation, and how users discover and apply for roles.
• Research the effective altruism movement's career concepts, such as high-impact roles and global causes, to understand the board's theory of change.
• Look for public information on the Centre for Effective Altruism's other products and services to see how this job board fits into its broader work.

Likely interview topics

Based on the job description, expect questions about:

• How would you increase discovery and placement of users into high-impact roles on a curated job board?
• Walk us through a marketing experiment you ran to grow traffic reliably, and how you identified the most cost-effective acquisition strategy.
• How would you build tracking and evaluation systems to measure whether the board drives placements, and what conversion rates and retention metrics would you track?
• Which larger product opportunity would you pursue first: logged-in experiences with CV matching, AI career advisors, or broader careers products, and why?
• How do you run experiments with clear success criteria across a theory of change, from traffic growth to placement rates?

Common mistakes to avoid

• Focusing only on product features and ignoring the marketing and traffic growth side of the role.
• Claiming you can measure impact without describing specific tracking, conversion rates, retention, or placement metrics.
• Proposing large product bets like AI career advisors without explaining how you would test and decide whether to pursue them.
• Treating this as a generic product role and not connecting your work to placements into high-impact roles across global causes.