The Cause Prioritization lead must have quantitatively-oriented advanced degrees and substantial relevant experience using empirical tools to make rigorous, evidence-based decisions in the real world. Practically, our senior research staff typically has 5-10 years of post-grad work experience prior to joining GiveWell. We're happy to consider applicants who do not have advanced degrees, but we'll look for a commensurate amount of relevant experience. You can review our staff bios here for more practical insight on the backgrounds and experience of our current team.
We expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful and happy on our team. This isn’t a full list, but hopefully it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:
GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally energizing—you like our approach to research and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.
You’re unusually curious—you ask lots of questions, and you're willing to interrogate others' work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work, and you aren’t defensive when your research comes under scrutiny.
You're a generalist and agile —you are able to get up to speed quickly on new topics and you feel comfortable task-switching. You are comfortable pivoting your focus as we learn new information, and are continuously reassessing promisingness.
You're a strong strategic thinker. You find ways to impose structure on a broad and undefined problem (e.g., how should your team prioritise work across a huge range of potential cause areas), you can develop and articulate a vision to your team, and build processes to execute that vision.
You're excited by people management. You take other team members' professional development seriously, and can provide a supportive environment whilst also delivering constructive feedback.
You're able to quickly hone in on the crux of the argument when assessing other people's work, probing on the most decision-relevant assumptions even in fields where you have limited contextual knowledge.
You're entrepreneurial. When you see a gap, you want to fill it, whether that's designing a new program, finding an implementer, or setting up a new kind of funding mechanism. You make bets under uncertainty.
You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that underlie your work. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours and your team’s.
You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don’t seem to rely on commensurate evidence. You carefully and legibly communicate about your confidence levels.
You appreciate the value of an excellent reputation and strong relationships. You can moderate your directness and intensity when you’re communicating with external folks.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 annual department retreats and twice-annual whole org visit weeks 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 obligations.
After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of compensated work trials and interviews. 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.
The application deadline for this role is September 30th.
You don't need to submit a cover letter—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.
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
[email protected]. 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.
