Senior Researcher, Research Communication

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.

We're hiring for roles that will help us scale effectively. We expect to make one or more hires from this round, including a leadership-track hire who we believe can scale to build out a new function. This role (or roles) will shape how we communicate about our research, our reasoning, our uncertainties, and our mistakes, in keeping with our commitments to transparency and rigor.

The problem this role would solve and why it matters

GiveWell's Research teams own the work of determining which grants are most cost-effective: investigating existing programs, building and revising cost-effectiveness models, commissioning research to resolve our own uncertainties, and working with implementers to develop opportunities that don't yet exist but should. Our philanthropy and communications teams own the last mile of how we talk about that work, whether through a 1:1 conversation with a donor, a donor event, or scalable communications like blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts.

Between these teams sits a question: what are the most important and accurate things we should say about our work? Answering it requires a nuanced understanding of our research and our theories of change, and it is epistemically demanding, because our external communications are held to the standards of rigor, calibration, and honesty about uncertainty that we apply to our decision-making.

Today, answering these questions runs through a small group of senior leaders. But our funding is growing, and our programs are growing with it. The volume of research we need to cover and translate keeps expanding, as does the volume of complex, sophisticated donor questions, often from people considering making very large donations to our work. The result is a new-to-us problem: producing answers that meet GiveWell’s research bar, at speed and at volume.

The hard part of this work is rarely the phrasing. It's working out what we truly believe and what communicates that most effectively to those who follow our work. This matters far beyond fundraising. Sharing our work is central to our mission: we publish our reasoning so others can challenge it, and we change our minds when the evidence demands it. We believe excellent research communications could materially shape the direction of billions of dollars in funding from GiveWell donors and other actors, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

We see this role as critical to building a new function at GiveWell. You would help us reimagine and shape the substance of what we share with our donors and the outside world.

About the role

This senior role would own GiveWell's answers to the hardest questions we get about our work. Your responsibilities would include:

• Working out what statements our research supports, developing what we can claim and defend, testing that against the researchers who own the underlying analysis, and holding a high bar for accuracy when a simpler answer would be more convenient.
• Prioritizing across a portfolio of questions to deliver answers at the right altitude: which questions need a fast answer with correctly conveyed uncertainty, which warrant deeper research, and which point to gaps in our communication that are best served by published research.
• Supporting the CEO and our senior leadership in external communications and major donor engagement. A significant portion of the work, especially as this role ramps up, will support Elie Hassenfeld, our co-founder and CEO, in his direct work with our largest supporters. Over time, you would engage with donors directly on research questions.
• Setting the standard for external communications about GiveWell's research. Some communications go directly to individual donors, but our best work builds a platform that lets us communicate more effectively with everyone: tens of thousands of donors around the world, and partner organizations who may look to our work to inform their own.
• Producing work yourself to GiveWell’s standards of quality, including long-form write-ups explaining our research, data visualizations, and interactive tools that deepen engagement with our work. As the function scales, we expect this will extend to hiring and leading a team that produces the work. (See “Current and future team structure” below.)

Questions you might take on

More than anything else, this role is about how you engage with questions. Take, as an example, a question we often get from our donors: "How much room for more funding do you have?" We have an answer, but it isn't easy to state simply, because the question nests several others inside it: What, exactly, counts as room for more funding? Over what time frame? How much risk are we willing to take on with respect to future fundraising? Where could we be right, where could we be wrong, and what would change our view?

Answering well means knowing how to answer all of that.

Other questions you might take on include:

• Why did GiveWell set its moral weights the way it did, and how much would changing them affect our judgments?
• How much room for more funding does GiveWell have? How much do we need, by when, and to do what?
• What are the best ways to increase vaccination rates in a given country?
• Is there a cost-effectiveness bar at which a donor should prefer a peer organization to GiveWell's top charities?
• What is GiveWell's view on emerging technologies in malaria control?
• How are we thinking about programs like gene drives to eradicate malaria?
• How is GiveWell taking AI into account in its grantmaking strategy?

Answering these questions well will take a range of tools and approaches that make our work easier to explain, more accessible, and more compelling to people worldwide.

As a concrete example: our cost-effectiveness models have lived in spreadsheets for years. Given the tools available and our team's capacity, that was the best way to share our work. Now, many tools could make this work much easier to engage with.

For this and other projects, the work will run the gamut:

• Writing long, detailed research write-ups
• Creating data visualizations and charts
• Working with AI to build interactive tools
• Responsively answering questions from our largest donors
• Doing public-facing work with donor audiences, including public speaking and answering questions live

Current and future team structure

Where this role sits

This role would report to Alex Cohen, Program Director, Research, and leader of our Cross-Cutting team, and would sit within our Research team. Cross-Cutting owns the research questions that span our portfolio.

Because this function is new to GiveWell, and because it matters so much to how we deliver on our mission, this hire would also have a dotted-line relationship with Elie Hassenfeld, our co-founder and CEO, and would work closely with our Outreach teams. Beyond informing our Outreach work, this role is the entry point for big-picture questions from donors that ultimately bear on our research strategy.

Future team leadership

We may make one hire from this round, or a few. We see this work as building out a function, and we expect it to need a team and a team leader. We think that leader could come from this round. If we make a single hire, we'll weigh team leadership experience more heavily, because that person will be best positioned to grow into leading the function. If we make several hires, we expect them to join as peers at the same level, with the understanding that the team's eventual leader will likely emerge from the cohort.

Because of this, we may make hires who fit different profiles:

• An exceptional individual contributor who matches the strengths described below. They want to do this work at the highest level, and managing people isn't what draws them in. That is a great outcome for us, as this work rewards depth, and succeeding in this role does not require wanting to manage.
• A future team lead who has built or led a team before, or is clearly ready to. They are energized by defining a standard, hiring against it, and managing people to it. They're willing to spend their first months or longer producing excellent work with their own hands. They understand that is how they will earn the command of our research that leading this work will require.

About you

You like to understand things deeply – well enough that you can explain them simply and concretely to someone encountering them for the first time. You really like explaining ideas. It's not enough to get an answer that's satisfying to you. You're most excited when you can communicate technical ideas in plain language that helps others understand them.

You get excited about a very wide variety of questions. You're comfortable deciding which of five open questions warrants days of research, which warrants a one-pager, and which requires a fast answer with our uncertainty clearly conveyed.

You'd rather put something rough in front of a colleague after an hour to get feedback and get to a faster answer than spend a week producing something excellent alone. You bring people along in your thinking, and you are interested in getting up to speed with others' perspectives.

You like working on a variety of things. You'd much rather work on five questions over the course of a week than one question over the course of a month.

You love improving. You're more interested in getting the answer right than being right.

You're motivated by global health and development and by finding the most effective ways to improve the lives of people in low-income countries.

You're excited about leading work in a variety of mediums, whether it's long detailed write-ups, data visualizations and charts, or interactive tools.

You operate well in a matrixed environment. Most of the people whose work you depend on won't report to you, and much of your credibility will come from researchers deciding you understand their analysis well enough to speak for it. You have experience earning that kind of standing in an organization, and you're comfortable pushing back on your colleagues, being pushed back on, and holding a line when it is important.

A candidate for the future team lead role has likely built and managed a team before. They are excited to define a mandate for a new team and manage people to it while still producing excellent work themselves for as long as the role requires.

We also expect that people with the qualities below, which we look for across our Research team, will be the most successful and happy in this role.

• GiveWell's mission and methods personally energize you. You like our approach to research, and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.
• You're abnormally curious. You ask lots of questions, and you're willing to interrogate others' work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work: you aren't defensive when your work is scrutinized.
• You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don't seem to be backed by commensurate evidence. You communicate your confidence levels carefully and legibly.
• You love a gnarly problem. You figure out the most important questions to answer, go deep on the details where they matter (and move on where they don't), and reassess your mental models based on what you've learned.

A quantitatively oriented advanced degree is a nice-to-have rather than a must, and a lower priority than the qualities above.

Process

The process for this role will be individualized based on how familiar we already are with a candidate's work abilities in the role areas. For someone whose work we don't know well, that could mean a short call about the role, up to two paid work trials, a longer interview, and reference checks — though it may be shorter or longer depending on the candidate. We only move people to a next step when we're confident it's a good use of their time, and we aim to balance respect for that time with rigor in how we make our hiring decisions.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
  • NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $308,000.
  • All other U.S. locations: $280,000.
  • International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency. We can share a precise figure upon request after the first work trial stage.
• 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)
  • 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)
• Location: GiveWell's staff work primarily remotely, within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible for fully remote work.
  • Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, New York; 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 U.S. 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.
• Working arrangements: We're uncertain about whether non-full-time arrangements are possible and exactly how your work might develop over time — we're happy to discuss both in depth with strong candidates.
• 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.
• 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 commitments.

About GiveWell

GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify. 

GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than 340,000 lives.

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

GiveWell grants have:

• Helped governments navigate changes to the funding landscape and implement high-impact health programs, like HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
• Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we funded a program to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
• Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like healthcare support and malnutrition treatment in northern Cameroon.
• Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.  
• Tested our assumptions and refined our understanding through further research and data collection, including improved estimates of disease burden and studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality and the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income.

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 to address our uncertainties and gathering independent monitoring and evaluation data about the programs we support. We change our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.

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, considering 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.

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