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 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 ~$400 million in 2024.

The Role

We’re hiring a Head of Finance to lead GiveWell’s accounting and FP&A. You’ll manage a growing operational budget and a complex financial portfolio of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants while upholding high standards of external transparency, integrity, and compliance. You’ll report to our Head of Business Operations and work closely with all of GiveWell’s senior leaders.

Why we’re hiring this role right now: We’re seeking an experienced finance leader to build on the strong foundation laid by our current Controller as she moves on to new endeavors.

Job Duties

Manage the finance team: Our current team has a Senior Accountant and third-party support, and we plan to hire additional team members once we have the right leader in place. You’ll maintain high standards for current and future staff, coach your team to deliver outstanding results, and develop a strong finance team culture.

Financial compliance and integrity. You’ll own compliance requirements for our entities in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, and ensure that GiveWell maintains high standards for financial accountability and transparency.

Accounting: Reconcile, track, and report on hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable funds and grants according to donor restrictions and grant commitments. Your team will conduct general ledger accounting (expense review, revenue reconciliation, etc.), monthly close processes, multi-entity/currency consolidations, financial statement preparation, and other essential accounting functions. 

Financial planning and analysis: Develop budgeting and forecasting processes, prepare budget-to-actual analyses for leadership, create financial models to support strategic decision-making, and establish appropriate cadences for financial reviews.

Cross-functional partnership: You'll maintain relationships with leaders across the operations, research, and outreach departments, partnering with teams to drive organizational objectives while maintaining appropriate controls. You'll ensure that critical financial decisions are well-informed, and you'll also advise department leaders on complex questions like budget planning, resource allocation, financial controls, and financial strategy.

Systems, processes, and policies: Formalize and document GiveWell's accounting policies and procedures. Take on projects like consolidating our UK and US general ledger systems, researching and implementing new sub-ledgers to enhance financial reporting capabilities, and integrating new systems with our existing general ledger.

About You

We’re looking for someone who has at least seven years of experience in closely related finance work, and a CPA or a master’s degree in a relevant field (e.g., accounting or a finance-focused MBA). Our ideal candidate has led a finance or accounting team through complex accounting projects and has worked in a high-growth organization.

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

• 7+ years of professional finance experience, including accounting, financial modeling, budget development, forecasting, and management reporting
• 3+ years as a people manager
• Background in accounting or audits
• Expert Excel skills 
• Excellent communication skills, particularly in working effectively with non-finance colleagues
• A track record of success with complex finance/accounting projects where results depended on cross-functional stakeholder engagement
• Experience with:
• Nonprofit accounting, fund accounting, grant management, or restricted funding compliance
• Large, complex dataset management
• Internal control development

We also think these preferred characteristics will help you do well in the role and at GiveWell:

• Alignment with our values and passion about GiveWell's mission
• An open, collaborative approach to solving problems
• Proficiency with Sage Intacct and Salesforce
• Experience with:
• Data analytics and business intelligence
• Consolidated financial statements, especially of international entities
• Managing a trust, endowment, or a large fund, including balancing and developing investment policies

Key Questions

How does this role contribute to GiveWell’s mission?

We think excellent financial systems will increase our efficiency, reduce cognitive overhead for our fundraising and research teams, and allow us to move faster and more judiciously. A few specific areas where we think you’ll increase our impact:

• Grantmaking operations: Our research team identifies cost-effective interventions, but you’ll ensure the money actually gets where it needs to go. To do that, you’ll track complex grant restrictions, manage multi-currency flows, and provide financial analysis to our research leadership team.
• Organizational risk: We handle hundreds of millions in donor funds across multiple countries and regulatory environments. Poor financial management could result in legal compliance issues, violations of donor restrictions, or misallocation of funds. You’ll build the controls and processes that prevent those failures.
• Donor trust: Donors trust our work because we’re unusually transparent about nearly every aspect of our work, including our research, mistakes, and operational activities. You’ll be responsible for the transparency of our finances, ensuring donors can see how their funds are used. Financial transparency helps us maintain the trust that underlies our fundraising success and bottom-line impact.
• Operational efficiency: You’ll build and maintain systems that reduce drag and let the rest of the organization focus on their core work.

How does this role interact with the rest of the organization?

You’ll build relationships with leaders across our Operations, Research, and Outreach departments and represent the finance team to the entire organization. You’ll be involved in every project that touches on long-term financial planning and analysis.

What are some of the reasons I might not like this role?

We’re seeking a hands-on leader who enjoys getting involved in the work. If you’re someone who prefers a role focused entirely on management or strategy, this might not be the best match for you.

What is the hiring process like?

Our basic plan for the hiring process is listed below. If you move to step 2, you’ll be in touch with a member of our recruiting team who will quickly answer any questions about logistics and timelines.

1. Submit your application below. You don’t need to write a cover letter—we deliberately turned off the cover letter upload field; we only need you to answer our application questions.
2. 30-minute introductory conversation with our Manager, Talent Acquisition
3. 45-minute introductory conversation with our Head of Business Operations
4. 4 to 8-hour work trial
5. 60-minute interview with our Head of Business Operations and General Counsel
6. 75-minute values-based interview
7. 60-minute final interview with our Head of Business Operations and Head of People
8. Reference checks
9. Offer

Please note that we could choose not to move forward at any stage of the process described above, and we do not share individualized evaluative feedback with applicants.

We plan to devote substantial time to reviewing applications, and we will respond to everyone who applies. We’ll review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s better to apply sooner. If we decide to close the application by a specific deadline, we’ll update this page at least one week in advance.

Details

• Team: You’ll report to the Head of Business Operations and manage our Senior Accountant on the Finance team. You will make key hires to continue building the team. We anticipate making 1-2 hires over the next year to complete the team.
• Compensation: We share upfront information about our compensation for every role. We set compensation based on internal leveling and external benchmarking, and we typically do not negotiate compensation at the offer stage.
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $196,800
• All other U.S. locations: $178,400
• Location: This position is eligible to work fully remotely in the U.S. We’re not accepting candidates based outside of the U.S. for this position.
• Offices: You are welcome, but not required, to work from our offices in Oakland, California, or Brooklyn, New York. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to relocate to either of these two physical office locations.
• 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. 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.
• 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
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Travel: Every year, we host two Visit Week gatherings in our Oakland office, bringing together the entire GiveWell team. We also hold an annual retreat for our operations department and may hold an annual Finance team retreat. We’ll expect you to attend each of those three or four gatherings, although we’ll offer some flexibility in the event of major conflicts or emergencies.
• 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.

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 $2.4 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 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 will save more than 270,000 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 address our uncertainties 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 GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully and considers the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.

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 careers@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.