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 nearly $400 million in 2024.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Senior Research Associates 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.

Senior Research Associates will have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researcher or 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.

This job listing is currently only open to economics PhD students on the job market. If you’re curious about how this job might look different from other opportunities you’re considering on the job market, check out this short doc written by Alex Cohen (Principal Researcher; cross-cutting team lead).

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.
• Building relationships with experts relevant to our work, for example, academics who specialize in interventions we are reviewing (e.g., malaria, malnutrition treatment, in-line water chlorination), leaders and program staff at organizations we are considering for funding, and program staff at foundations who are also evaluating where to allocate funds.
• Publishing reports and blog posts on our website. Transparency is a core value of ours and we aim to publish as much supporting information regarding our conclusions as we can. Researchers write up our findings and reasoning for publication on our website or summarize key points from their work in blog posts.

What is career development like?

After gaining experience on the team, Senior Research Associates have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researchers, who lead the development of our research agendas. Senior Researchers may then pursue a few pathways for career development based on their preferences and GiveWell’s needs. Some choose to develop wider and more autonomous research agendas as individual contributors, while others take on people management responsibilities. Another potential pathway is to transition into a Program Officer position, in which you’d own a high-impact, cost-effective grantmaking portfolios by deepening your expertise, growing your networks, and understanding the broader context within a specific grantmaking area. Program Officers think through questions like:

• How should we balance exploring and seeding new, smaller opportunities with funding cost-effective opportunities at scale today?
• How can we triangulate empirical evidence against expert opinion on other qualitative features, like organizational track record?
• What is research we can fund today that could substantially impact our grantmaking five years from now?
• How much uncertainty are we willing to accept before making a grant? What key research questions do we need to answer before making a grant, and which ones can we deprioritize or answer later?

Team structure

Our research department has over 50 people, and is currently organized into eight teams:

• Five of the teams (Water, Livelihoods, Nutrition, Malaria, and Vaccines) focus on specific areas of grantmaking.
• The New Areas team focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell.
• The Cross-Cutting team focuses on methodological issues, research quality, and other big-picture concerns that cut across all of our research work.
• The Commons team provides generalized research support to each of the other teams, including landscaping research, vetting, and publishing.

In most cases, we hire Senior Research Associates without knowing which subteam they’ll eventually sit on. We aim to expose new researchers to different types of work and parts of the team over several months to inform their eventual subteam placement. (We might settle on a subteam more quickly if new hires bring specific, specialized expertise.)

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values. We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.
• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.
• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.
• Lean research team = huge personal impact. Our research team of just under 50 people directs hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.

About you

You should be graduating with a doctoral degree in a quantitative field like economics, mathematics, or statistics. The practical work of this role is probably most aligned with the applied microeconomics subfield (think development, health, labor, or similar), but we also have successful team members from theoretical and behavioral econ backgrounds, and we’re open to applicants from all subfields.

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.

Details

• Team: You'll join one of our grantmaking teams (see our org structure here) and report to a Senior Researcher or Program Officer.
• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $162,400
• All other U.S. locations: $147,300
• 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.
• 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
• 403(b) retirement plan
• 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.

Other notes

• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and several compensated work trials. You can see more details about our hiring process on our FAQs page!
• We devote significant staff capacity to initial application review, and we respond to all applications as quickly as possible.
• We’re quite flexible on work trial timelines for job market candidates - we recommend completing our trials as you have time between flyouts, interviews, and submissions. If we receive strong interest in this role, we might spread out invitations to our initial application exercise to reduce the load on our graders (members of our research grade all trials).
• We’re aiming to hire four to six full-time Senior Research Associates.
• If we settle on an application deadline, we’ll write it in bold here. If you’re on our website job posting and don’t see a deadline, there is no deadline. If you’re reading this on an external job board and don’t see a deadline, you should double-check on our website.
• You don't need to submit a cover letter with your application—we only want your resume/CV and answers to the application questions below.
• We don’t offer informational calls, but please email us at careers@givewell.org with any questions not answered here!

About GiveWell

GiveWell is dedicated to finding and funding outstanding giving opportunities in global health and development, sharing the full details of our analysis with everyone for free. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify. 

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.6 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 340,000 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.

GiveWell 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 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 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, 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.

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell’s Privacy Statement for Applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell’s Work Trial Policy.