GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from raising $1.5 million annually in 2010 to raising over $300 million in 2023.

We’re hiring a Senior Accountant to report to our Controller and become GiveWell’s primary point of contact for monthly books reconciliation and grantmaking financial flows, which entail the receipt and disbursement of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. You’ll also support senior managers in tracking, reporting, and benchmarking GiveWell’s operational activities.

What makes this opportunity unique?

• Have an outsized impact with your career. GiveWell’s work saves and improves lives around the world, and you’ll help ensure we do this work efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Work with brilliant, motivated colleagues. You’ll be on a team of smart, hard-working, and considerate people who are passionate about doing good in the world.
• Large scope of responsibility. You’ll be an accounting generalist on a small team, which means you’ll personally own and implement improvements on a variety of financial systems across GiveWell.
• High pay, high expectations, high performance. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture, and our salaries are competitive with nonprofit peers.

Responsibilities

You’ll perform core accounting duties for GiveWell. Specifically, we'll expect you to:

• Execute general ledger accounting and monthly close.
• Maintain ledgers and reconcile accounts.
• Code and enter invoices into the accounting system.
• Process and pay AP and employee expenses.
• Propose journal entries for accrued expenses.
• Review and account for HR/payroll activities. 
• Review employee expenses for compliance with GiveWell’s expense policy.
• Reconcile revenue.
• Reconcile donations from several payment platforms including bank deposits, securities, and cryptocurrency to a CRM system for the purpose of general ledger uploads and regranting to charities.
• Investigate variances as needed.
• Work with our Controller to produce:
• Monthly and quarterly GAAP financials, budget tracking, and consolidations.
• Annual audit, tax, and compliance including 1099 preparations, quarterly estimates, and the preparation and supporting documents for federal and state tax returns and audit.
• Other financial reports as necessary.
• Maintain and improve procedures and internal controls related to revenue and general ledger accounting.
• Support internal operations of the organization by assisting with onboarding vendors and evaluating contracts with finance implications.
• Do whatever else may be needed to support excellent accounting at GiveWell. 
• For example, you might forecast expenses into the future, research best practices for various dimensions of financial risk management, or assist our grantmaking staff in grantee due diligence on financial reporting and expenses.

What do our finance and operations teams include?

Currently, our finance team consists of a Controller and Grants Associate. Our day-to-day accounting is supported by accounting contractors and external accountants. The finance team sits on GiveWell’s Operations team, which includes staff working on finance, HR and people operations, legal, office management, and IT.

Who we’re looking for

The ideal candidate is a licensed CPA and has experience owning financial reporting. We don’t have a strong preference for staff with nonprofit experience and would be excited to review applications from candidates looking to transition from the private sector.

We expect that strong candidates will have all of the characteristics listed below:

• Licensed CPA
• 3+ years of financial/accounting experience.
• Expert Excel skills. You’re fluent with filters, searches, conditional formatting, database manipulation, pivot tables, and vlookups/index match.
• Strong familiarity with GAAP and SAAS financial guidelines.
• Experience with:
• Common accounting systems. We currently use Sage Intacct, Salesforce, and Bill.com.
• Supporting financial audits.
• Preparing and reviewing federal tax returns
• (Preferred but not required) Consolidated financial reporting or UK-based entities.
• Knowledge of federal, state, and local tax issues and procedures.

Other desirable characteristics:

• Flexibility: you’ve completed open-ended accounting projects and optimized existing processes. You’ve worked closely with non-technical stakeholders.
• Prioritization: you spend most of your time working on the highest-priority things.
• Responsiveness and timeliness.
• You provide excellent customer service to internal stakeholders.
• Detail orientation: it bothers you when the small things aren’t done properly.
• A combination of public and nonprofit experience is a plus.
• Alignment with GiveWell’s work culture.
• You’re excited to work in a small, impact-obsessed, and growing organization. 
• You have a low-ego approach to work. You’re excited to have transparent conversations about how to solve problems, and you're enthusiastic about receiving frequent feedback.
• You’re wildly proactive and are comfortable—even thrive in—ambiguity and a changing organization. 
• You are passionate about helping to improve global health and alleviate global poverty.
• You’re excited about GiveWell’s organizational values.

Details

• Position: Senior Accountant
• Compensation:
• Tier 1 (San Francisco Bay Area or New York City): $126,600
• Tier 2 (all other US locations): $114,800
• International: Determined on a case-by-case basis.
• Reports to: Daisy Hao, Controller
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California, or Brooklyn, NYC. We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis, but we’ll ask that you commit to a minimum three-hour overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.
• Travel: You may be required to visit our Oakland office during key busy periods, like audit season.
• 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.
• Work authorization/visas: For this role, we’re only accepting applications from candidates who have U.S. work authorization. We don’t plan to sponsor visas.
• Timeline: We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis and aim to make an offer by the end of August. We’d like you to start as soon as possible after extending you an offer, but we’re happy to adjust timelines for exceptional candidates. We encourage you to submit your application by early August, though we don’t currently have a firm deadline for applications (we’ll update this page if that changes).
• Benefits: Our benefits include: 
• Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the U.S. for you and any dependents)
• Family formation and fertility support
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Four weeks of paid time off per year 
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan

About GiveWell

GiveWell makes grants to support cost-effective programs that save and improve lives. We focus on global health and poverty alleviation in the lowest-income parts of the world because that is where we've found we can have the greatest impact.

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In 2022, we made over $400 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we've directed has saved more than 200,000 lives.

GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of top charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs. 

Recent grants have:

• Helped governments to implement high-impact health programs, like in-line chlorination of drinking water in India and HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
• Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our recent grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.   
• Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don't have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative's Incubator and Evidence Action's Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we recently funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
• Tested our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers' income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.

We never take for granted that GiveWell's work is good for the world. We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research and external analysis to uncover our own mistakes and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.

Additional information

We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a human reads all components of every application carefully and considers the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you’re not sure you meet every qualification (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway. We respond to everyone, and we’ll be happy to review your application.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at jobs@givewell.org. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell's privacy statement for job applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell's Work Trial Policy.