Researcher

GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.

Summary GiveWell is seeking exceptional Researchers to help direct hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective global health and poverty alleviation programs. You’ll have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale. You’ll execute ambitious research agendas, answer complex questions, and inform high-impact grantmaking decisions by combining rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment. Researchers will have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researcher or Senior Program Officer roles, leading research agendas or owning complex grantmaking portfolios. We’re open to a wide variety of professional development options depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role You’ll join a small grantmaking team to execute ambitious research agendas, sifting through the countless questions we could try to answer and honing in on those that matter most. Your decisions will inform the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to dozens of grantees. Your practical work will combine empirical evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, and developing your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these: - What should we believe about the impacts of improved water quality on all-cause mortality? - What is the impact of building footbridges in rural communities? - How can we model the general equilibrium effects of cash transfers? - How should we prioritize programs that reduce poverty relative to programs that reduce deaths? - How should we think about the opportunity cost of other actors’ contributions to programs we fund? - How should we account for high levels of uncertainty in our cost-effectiveness estimates? - How do we use effects from trials conducted 30 to 40 years ago to predict impacts today?

Responsibilities include: - Analyzing interventions (e.g., vaccine demand generation, vitamin A supplementation, seasonal malaria chemoprevention) at various levels of depth to refine our view about the cost-effectiveness of a particular intervention and recommend either deprioritization or further work. Researchers review existing empirical evidence about intervention impacts, build models, speak with subject matter experts about particular interventions, and use their judgment to come up with a bottom line. Examples of this work are available on our intervention reports page. - Building cost-effectiveness models to estimate the costs and benefits of a particular intervention. These models take into account a wide variety of considerations, including: one's prior estimate for an intervention's impact, the strength of the evidence, the size of the effects, the similarity between the context in which an intervention was studied and will be implemented, negative and/or offsetting effects, and how funding this intervention would affect decisions by other actors (e.g., local government, donor governments). See more on our page about our cost-effectiveness models. - Reviewing specific grantmaking opportunities. We receive and solicit requests for funding on an ongoing basis. Researchers investigate each of these opportunities to determine whether or not they should receive funding. Reviewers discuss each grant opportunity with the applying organization, consider its plans and assess the likelihood it will achieve them, estimate the cost-effectiveness of a grant and forecast its likelihood of success. When necessary, they solicit feedback from outside experts (e.g., academics, government officials) about the opportunity.

Tackle thorny research questions with creative approaches. We often need to answer questions that don’t have clear answers in published academic journals or other data sources (see some examples above), but which nevertheless matter significantly to our bottom-line funding decisions. You’ll come up with creative approaches to answer these questions, and your work will often influence the funding decisions of many of GiveWell’s research subteams.

a. You'll join one of our grantmaking teams (see our org structure here) and report to a Senior Researcher or Senior Program Officer.

b. Compensation: NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $220,000 All other U.S. locations: $200,000 International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency.

c. Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely.

Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to any of our physical office locations. International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. A successful candidate will need to commit to a work schedule that has some overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.

Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.

Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.

Benefits: Our benefits include: - Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents) - Four weeks of paid time off per year - 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave - Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships - Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)

Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences (on average 1-2 per year), with additional travel for those interested in traveling more. Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend quarterly whole-org and department retreats to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and we’ll accommodate staff who have conflicting family or other obligations.

Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date.

Application deadline: We don't currently have an application deadline. If that changes, we'll update the posting. We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis, so we recommend applying as soon as possible.

About you Our typical hire for this role has a master's degree in a quantitative field (e.g., economics, policy, public health) with a few years of relevant experience, or a PhD in a quantitative field with limited post-graduation experience. We're willing to make exceptions for applicants who don't have advanced degrees but demonstrate equivalent depth of expertise.

We expect you will be characterized by many of the below qualities. We encourage you to apply if you would use the majority of these characteristics to describe yourself: - You are passionate about helping improve global health and alleviate global poverty as much as possible. - You are highly skilled at critically analyzing and synthesizing empirical research and understanding how a body of evidence may apply to real-world problems. - You are able to plan an efficient approach to exploring complicated questions, including identifying and focusing on the most decision-relevant aspects of a project. - You consider the big picture, asking questions like: is this project appropriately formulated and the best use of my time? What is GiveWell getting wrong in our research? - You clearly communicate what you believe and why, as well as what you are uncertain about. - You ask a lot of questions, and are curious, rather than defensive, when interrogating your own or others’ work. - You are able to execute research that holds up under scrutiny from others and over time. - You are respectful, effective, and efficient in your interactions with colleagues as well as external parties.