Summary

GiveWell is seeking a Senior Water Researcher to help direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective water interventions we can find. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

Our water grantmaking has historically focused on improving drinking water quality through chlorination — primarily chlorine dispensers and in-line chlorination — in low- and middle-income countries with a high burden of waterborne disease. In 2025, we ran a public Request for Information (RFI) that resulted in 18 pilot grants to 12 implementing partners across six African countries, totaling roughly $20 million. In 2026, we are beginning to pivot from a narrow focus on chlorination toward a broader exploration of the water sector. This includes investigating alternative water quality interventions (e.g., filtration, in-line ultraviolet disinfection, chemical contamination remediation), different clean water delivery models (e.g. diarrheal outbreak prevention and response, safe water enterprises), exploring water access and infrastructure layering with multilaterals such as the World Bank, market shaping for chlorine supply chains and measurement technology, and R&D for hardware and better service delivery models.

As a Senior Water Researcher, you'll create and lead ambitious research agendas related to our portfolios of work and answer complex questions that will inform GiveWell's grantmaking decisions. The researchers on our team combine rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

We're open to a wide variety of professional development pathways depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on water. You'll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and hone in on those that matter most. You'll also communicate externally about your work and mentor and advise other researchers on the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell water team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment.

What you might work on in your first year:

• How should we calibrate our cost-effectiveness estimates to real-world program performance? 
• How does chlorination compare with alternative water quality methods — such as filtration, in-line UV, and chemical contamination remediation — across different settings? Where, if anywhere, are these alternatives more cost-effective?
• Can GiveWell unlock large amounts of cost-effective room for more funding by partnering with multilaterals (e.g. the World Bank) to layer water treatment onto large-scale piped water infrastructure projects? What are the practical and political constraints?
• To what extent should our portfolio shift between water quality (our current focus) and water access? Are there access-related grantmaking opportunities — for example, supporting direct delivery of clean water, water kiosks, or boreholes paired with treatment — that meet our cost-effectiveness bar?
• How do we improve our estimate of the all-cause mortality effect of chlorination on children under-5? 
• How should we use new funding mechanisms — such as regranting, prizes, and a possible Water Incubator with implementing partners — to identify and scale promising interventions?

The Senior Water Researcher will help shape a major annual grantmaking portfolio, own grant investigations end-to-end (from research question through grant recommendation), and represent GiveWell to external counterparts. You'll have significant latitude to propose new areas of work.

Team structure

Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into eight teams:

• Five of the teams (Livelihoods, Malaria, Nutrition, Vaccination, and Water) 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.

There are currently three people on our water team.

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. In 2022, we directed about $440 million with a research staff of less than 40 people.
• 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

We expect the Senior Water Researcher to have

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, environmental engineering, environmental health, public health, economics, or related fields).
• Substantial professional experience in the water sector or an adjacent field (broadly defined). This could include experience in water quality, WASH, water infrastructure, environmental health modeling, or in program implementation, evaluation, or funding. We're especially interested in candidates with hands-on familiarity with water systems, epidemiology, or both. We don't expect any single candidate to have deep expertise across all of the areas we're exploring (chlorination, filtration, in-line UV, water access, market shaping, R&D), and we're happy to consider strong researchers whose expertise sits in any subset of these.

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 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 research comes under scrutiny.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird 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.
• You constantly assess whether you and the team are working on the most important things.

If you’re interested in working on GiveWell’s research team but don’t have water expertise, consider applying to our generalist Senior Researcher role, or our Researcher role if you have limited post-graduation experience.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $241,000.
• All other U.S. locations: $219,000.
• 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 US for you and any dependents)
• Four weeks of paid time off per year, plus a one week organization-wide summer break
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely. 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.
• 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. 
• 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 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.

Miscellaneous details:

• Please apply to only one Senior Researcher posting. If you have deep expertise in this area, this pod-specific role is the right fit. If not, there's no need to apply here — our generalist Senior Researcher role is designed for strong researchers who don't have a single specialization, and you don't need to apply to both. Applying to the generalist role won't put you at any disadvantage!
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of 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 have a strong preference for full-time applicants, but we’ll consider applications for part-time work. We aren’t interested in reviewing applications for contract or project-based work at this time.
• 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—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking a Senior Livelihoods Researcher to help us identify and fund the most cost-effective ways to improve living standards among the global poor. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us improve lives on a global scale.

Our livelihoods team is organized around thematic verticals, which includes cash transfers, broader social protection programs, education programs, and support for small and medium sized businesses in low-income countries. Across the portfolio, we try to maximize the social return on our investment, which we measure as the increase in relative consumption per $. We value consumption gains more highly among poorer populations, which has meant most of our grantmaking to date has focused on programs which support deprived populations within low-income countries (mostly in sub-Saharan Africa). 

As a Senior Livelihoods Researcher, you’ll create and lead ambitious research agendas related to our portfolios of work and answer complex questions that will inform GiveWell’s grantmaking decisions. The researchers on our team combine rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

We’re open to a wide variety of professional development pathways depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on livelihoods. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and honing in on those that matter most. You’ll also communicate externally about your work and advise other researchers on the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell livelihoods team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

• What effect do rural trailbridges have on the consumption of nearby communities? 
• What are long-run effects of unconditional cash transfers and ultra poor graduation programs on recipients?
• What would happen to prices and markets if we took cash transfer and ultra poor graduation programs to scale?
• How should GiveWell value interventions which try to reduce the variance of consumption (as opposed to increasing the average)?
• Several countries in sub-Saharan Africa have seen large scale-ups in donor-funded livelihoods programs over the last 30 years but very little movement in poverty headcount rates and median consumption per capita. Why?

Team structure

Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into eight teams:

• Five of the teams (Water, Nutrition, Malaria, Vaccines, and Livelihoods) 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.

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 over 60 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

We expect the Senior Livelihoods Researcher to have

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in economics, statistics, public policy or related fields)
• Substantial professional experience in the livelihoods landscape (broadly defined). This could include experience in academic research and/or in program implementation or funding.

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 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 research comes under scrutiny.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird 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.
• You constantly assess whether you and the team are working on the most important things.

If you’re interested in working on GiveWell’s research team but don’t have livelihoods expertise, consider applying to our generalist Senior Researcher role.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $241,000.
• All other U.S. locations: $219,000.
• 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 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
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely. 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.
• 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. 
• 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 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.

Miscellaneous details:

• Please note that our hiring process consists of the same work trials for the following roles: Senior Researcher, Researcher, and any of our specialized Senior Researcher roles. If, within the last year, you applied and were rejected for one of these roles, you should hold off on applying to the other roles, unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our team. If you're interested in all of these roles, please just apply once and note in your application that you'd like to be considered for the other roles, too.
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of 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 have a strong preference for full-time applicants, but we sometimes consider applications for part-time work on a case-by-case basis.
• 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—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.

The role

You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on malaria. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and honing in on those that matter most. You’ll also communicate externally about your work and mentor and advise other researchers on the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell malaria team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

• How should GiveWell’s portfolio of investments change in response to new technologies and shifts in government or funder priorities?
• How does expanding the use of newly-developed insecticides in nets affect cost-effectiveness? 
• What is the potential cost-effectiveness of novel interventions such as attractive toxic sugar baits at scale across contexts? 

Team structure

Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into seven 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.

Our malaria team has three subteams: two of them focus on grantmaking in vector control and chemoprevention, respectively, and the third is focused on cross-team research questions. You might sit on any of the three teams.

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. In 2022, we directed about $440 million with a research staff of less than 40 people.
• 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

We expect the Senior Malaria Researcher to have

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, statistics, economics or related fields)
• Substantial professional experience in the malaria landscape (broadly defined). This could include experience in epidemiological or health economics modeling, and/or in program implementation or funding.

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 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 research comes under scrutiny.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird 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.
• You constantly assess whether you and the team are working on the most important things.

If you’re interested in working on GiveWell’s research team but don’t have malaria expertise, consider applying to our generalist Senior Researcher role.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $241,000.
• All other U.S. locations: $219,000.
• 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 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
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely. 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.
• 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. 
• 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 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.

Miscellaneous details:

• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of 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 have a strong preference for full-time applicants, but we’ll consider applications for part-time work. We aren’t interested in reviewing applications for contract or project-based work at this time.
• 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—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.

The role

As a Research Analyst on GiveWell's Commons team, you will support our broader research team in identifying cost-effective giving opportunities. Your work will contribute to GiveWell’s decisions about how hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent to save and improve the lives of people living in the lowest-income communities in the world. You will also play a key role in fulfilling our commitment to transparency and ensuring that the work we produce is accurate and high quality.

You will contribute to our work in a variety of ways, including:

• Quality checking pages we publish about our work and spreadsheets that we rely on to inform our decision making
• Writing public summaries of the reasoning behind our grant decisions
• Answering defined research questions via desk research (for example, "What options does a maize farmer in Malawi have for selling their product?" or "How difficult is it for adults in rural Mozambique to purchase basic health commodities like chlorine tablets or insecticide treated nets?")
• Summarizing results from the monitoring and evaluation reports that grantees send us
• Updating our cost-effectiveness analyses to reflect new information or analysis performed by other research staff
• Exploring ways to use AI tools to increase the efficiency and quality of our team's work
• Providing occasional project management support (more detail below)

Why this role may not be the right fit

We want to be transparent about what this position entails so you can make an informed decision about whether it's right for you:

• This is an entry-level research position. For your first year, you'll primarily conduct vetting work—rigorously checking the work outputs of more senior research team members for accuracy and clarity. You won’t be driving strategic decisions or leading major research initiatives.
• Your projects will be assigned rather than self-generated. Senior researchers and program officers will determine your work priorities (typically vetting and well-defined research tasks) based on team needs. You'll have opportunities to share ideas and contribute to scoping discussions, but you won't set research strategy or have autonomy over your research agenda in this role.
• You won't specialize in a single grantmaking area. We're looking for generalists who can contribute across our grantmaking teams. You'll develop deep analytical skills through vetting, but you won't become "the malaria person" or focus exclusively on one cause area or intervention type.

If this sounds exciting to you—if you want to spend at least a year becoming excellent at rigorous vetting work and gaining familiarity with the fundamentals of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses—then this role could be a great fit. But if you're primarily motivated by strategic influence, specialization, or project ownership, you might want to wait for a more senior opportunity.

Team structure

Our research team is organized into subteams that each focus on a specific area of our grantmaking (malaria, water quality, vaccinations, etc.). The Commons team is external to these subteams; we provide shared and flexible research capacity so we can direct our effort toward the highest priority areas at a given time. As a Research Analyst on the Commons team, you will have opportunities to learn about and contribute to investigations across research subteams, giving you a breadth of knowledge about GiveWell's work. 

You may also have opportunities to temporarily embed in a subteam for the duration of a grant investigation or other project. During these periods, in addition to the research work noted above, you may be asked to help with the project management of research investigations, which can include tasks like maintaining our information management systems, keeping track of progress and checking in with relevant stakeholders as needed, scheduling and taking notes during calls with external contacts, and generally driving our investigations forward. 

In some cases, we expect that Research Analysts who are excelling in their role will be embedded permanently in a grantmaking subteam.

Role details and benefits

Team: You’ll report to the Commons Lead or Commons Coordinator.

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: $115,500
• All other U.S. locations: $105,000
• UK and Canada: We'll convert the non-NYC/Bay area salary into local currency using historical USD exchange rates.

Location: GiveWell staff primarily work remotely within the United States. GiveWell has offices in Oakland, California, Brooklyn, New York City, and London, UK which you are welcome but not required to work from. 

• International applicants: For this role, we can currently only hire team members based in the UK, Canada, or the United States who have prior work authorization. 

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.

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
• Four months of fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan

You can see our full list of benefits here.

Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.

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 research department. We’ll expect you to attend each of those three gatherings, although we’ll offer some flexibility in the event of major conflicts or emergencies.

Start date: At the offer stage, we'll try to accommodate your notice period and align your start date with other Research Analyst new hires. 

About you

We expect you will be characterized by most of the qualities listed below.

• Strong communicator: You write clearly and concisely. You are able to interface respectfully, effectively, and efficiently with people in all program areas at GiveWell and externally. You clearly communicate what you believe and why, as well as what you are uncertain about. You check in proactively when you’re unsure about something or when you notice a potential problem. You are able to translate clear, detailed write-ups about complex topics into clear and succinct public summaries. 
• Analytical: You are able to make judgment calls about how to interpret and use messy data and explain your reasoning for your choices. You are sufficiently comfortable with quantitative reasoning to summarize main points and identify key details within technical content.
• Conscientious: You have meticulous attention to detail. You are highly productive and keep your work organized. You are able to carefully follow a process with many steps. You are thoughtful about how you approach your work, keeping the big picture in mind and, when appropriate, asking questions about why we do things the way we do. You perform high-quality work, with or without supervision. You are receptive to feedback. You learn from your mistakes and rarely repeat them.
• Mission-motivated: You are passionate about maximizing global well-being. GiveWell is focused on programs that aim to save lives and improve human well-being in low- and middle-income countries. You want to contribute to GiveWell’s mission and are passionate about accomplishing as much as possible with the resources available.
• Curious and versatile: You are excited to learn about a wide cross-section of our grantmaking and to work with a variety of people. You actively seek out and adopt new tools and technologies—including AI and emerging platforms—that can improve our efficiency and impact. 

The ideal candidate for this position will possess most of the skills described above and will have at least a bachelor's degree and 1-5 years relevant experience. However, there is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. If you are on the fence about applying because you are unsure whether you are qualified, we would strongly encourage you to apply.

Hiring Process

After the initial application, our application process uses a mixture of interviews and work trials, which are anonymized before grading. We pay a flat rate for our work trials, beginning with the longer vetting assignment.

The work trials in our process allow us to better understand how applicants’ skills will translate to the work we do and allows you to learn more about our work. They also reduce bias in our hiring process — we’re better able to hire candidates with nontraditional backgrounds who nonetheless excel in our trials.

Our process is as follows:

• Initial application. Our application asks for basic information about you and why you are applying, as well as a number of questions designed to help us assess your fit for the role. We request that you include a resumé. We do not plan to review other materials, like cover letters or letters of recommendation, so we encourage you not to submit these.
• Spreadsheet vet assignment. You will be asked to review a spreadsheet for accuracy and reasoning transparency. This exercise should take a maximum of 4 hours and will be compensated at a flat rate of $184. Submissions will be graded anonymously.
• Spreadsheet vet follow-up: We’ll invite you to a 25 min call with someone from our hiring team to talk through your thought process on the vetting assignment and dig into any questions they have about your work.
• Grant page work trial: You will be asked to turn a rough, AI-generated draft of a page explaining our reasoning for making a fictional grant into a polished, public-facing grant page. This exercise should take a maximum of 6 hours and will be compensated at a flat rate of $276. 
• Interviews. You will have two additional interviews. In one, you’ll meet with the two hiring managers for this role to talk about your work on the trial assignments and answer any questions you have about the role. In the second, you’ll discuss your own work experience and GiveWell’s values.
• Reference checks. The final step in our process is to request and contact two references. If possible, we prefer for at least one reference to be a former or current manager.

You will receive communication about whether you are advancing after each stage of the process. We strive to respond to all applications within two weeks across all stages of the process; however, we typically receive a large volume of applications and may not always be able to achieve our desired response times. Let us know if you have specific circumstances (e.g., a competing offer or tighter timeline) that could impact timing. We may be able to speed up our turnaround times to accommodate your needs.

If you have questions about the process before you begin, feel free to reach out to us at careers@givewell.org.

AI note: We're exploring ways to use AI to improve the efficiency and quality of our team's work, and if you join GiveWell, you'll be encouraged to help us continue our experimentation. However, AI use is not permitted in all work trials. We state in each application stage whether or not AI use is permitted. In the cases where we restrict AI use in the application process, our goal is to get good information about each applicant's skills so that we can form a clear picture of the strengths you would bring to your work on our team.

The role

Our research team is seeking Project Managers who will provide critical support to the team to maximize the impact of a program portfolio of life-saving and poverty-alleviating programs. This is primarily a project management role, providing key support to GiveWell researchers during their research and grant investigations.

Responsibilities include:

• Project management of research and grantmaking plans. Project Managers are project management experts who manage the execution of research and grantmaking workflows.Project Managers make sure that a high volume of complex projects stay on track, our systems and tools are maintained and improved, and timelines are met. They bring excellent judgment for when to follow established processes and when to adapt them to their work. This could include:
• Keeping team trackers up to date and understanding how projects fit into broader team goals.
• Managing project timelines and deadlines, flagging risks and adjusting timelines as needed based on competing team priorities.
• Creating investigation templates and other tools to aid the research team in following consistent, high standards.
• Effective communication and coordination with internal and external contacts. Project Managers must clearly and effectively communicate with project contributors, internal teams, and external stakeholders about the projects they are managing. They will regularly interact  with external stakeholders, including grantees, with progressively more autonomy in those interactions. Project Managers facilitate smooth information flow and collaboration, including ensuring all parties have the information needed to do their jobs well. This could include:
• Writing and sending messages to grantees and other external contacts to request information, explain our process, or request feedback.
• Generating call agendas and tracking and communicating clear follow-up steps.
• Communicating the status of research projects to internal teams and ensuring smooth handoffs on fundraising and funding logistics. 
• Noticing unusual situations and flagging them to stakeholders early.
• Maintaining high attention to detail and accuracy. Project Managers are expected to maintain high standards for all work outputs, from system maintenance to content production. They ensure precision and reliability in data, documents, and processes. This could include:
• Ensuring that public-facing documents clearly cite sources and include important information for communicating our research and decision making.
• Updating team trackers with the most current information, so that teams and leadership can make decisions based on accurate and up-to-date project details.
• Assigning and following up on outstanding tasks in a timely manner, so the status of projects and next steps are clear.
• Maintaining organized and complete project files, ensuring information is accessible and usable for the broader team.
• Proactive problem-solving. Project Managers actively identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement within operational processes and systems, and propose and implement effective solutions to enhance workflows and overall team effectiveness. This could include:
• Creatively helping teams plan and execute on their top priorities, and assisting in re-prioritizing when needed.
• Improving guidance, templates, and processes that would better suit the team’s needs.
• Handling straightforward issues independently, and flagging more complex challenges early to managers or other team members, offering options for how to address them.

About you

We are growing and changing quickly, so above all we seek a team player who is flexible, organized, and eager to proactively seek out ways to support the team so that we can do more work, better. 

In addition, we expect you will be characterized by many of the below qualities. Exceptions may be made for excellent applicants who do not meet these criteria:

• You have a bachelor's degree (or higher) and 2 to 5 years experience in project management or operational support. 
• You are skilled at planning and managing projects, including identifying and focusing on the most decision-relevant aspects of a project and communicating effectively with teammates. You are known for proactively moving work forward – anticipating what’s needed, raising risks early, and creating momentum for the team.
• You enjoy creating order out of disorder, especially when there are many overlapping pieces and stakeholders.
• You are obsessed with details and love checking things off of your list, and you’re energized rather than overwhelmed by knowing there will always be more to tackle.
• You consider the big picture, asking questions like: is this project appropriately formulated and the best use of my time? How might we allocate our time more efficiently? Do we have the capacity to complete our goals?
• You clearly communicate what you believe and why, as well as what you are uncertain about.
• You are comfortable working in a document-heavy culture, where careful writing, clear documentation, and well-maintained systems enable effective collaboration.
• You ask a lot of questions, and are curious, rather than defensive, when interrogating your own or others’ work.
• You are respectful, effective, and efficient in your interactions with colleagues as well as external parties.
• You are passionate about helping improve global health and alleviate global poverty as much as possible.

Why this role might not be a good fit:

This Project Manager role is primarily focused on project management and operational excellence. We want to be transparent about some situations where candidates may struggle or be unsatisfied:

• You view project management as a stepping stone. This is a project management role, not a pathway into research or other functions at GiveWell. If you're primarily interested in becoming a researcher or working in another capacity, this position likely isn't the right fit. We're looking for people who are genuinely energized by excellent project management and operational support and would like to grow within this function.
• You're attached to specific systems or methodologies. In addition to some of the usual project management systems, we also use a number of custom workflows tailored to our research needs. If you're deeply committed to implementing particular project management frameworks (like Agile, Scrum, or some other specific PM software) rather than adapting to what makes sense for the project at hand, you may find this frustrating. We need people who focus on operational goals first and can flexibly use, adapt, or improve processes as tools to get there.
• You prefer lower-volume work or dislike task switching. Project Managers juggle many concurrent projects with competing deadlines in a fast-paced environment. If you prefer focusing on one project at a time or like the feeling of having wrapped up a project and having “nothing on your list,” the intensity and volume of this role may not suit your working style.
• You dislike a document-heavy culture. GiveWell uses extensive written documentation, and Project Managers are expected to navigate and contribute to that culture. If you find it frustrating to read through detailed documents, extract the key information, and keep track of many written threads at once, this role may feel overwhelming. Success here requires comfort with written communication and the ability to manage a large volume of documentation.
• You have significantly more experience than we're seeking. This role is designed for people with 2-5 years of relevant experience. If you have substantially more experience (e.g., 7+ years in project management or operations) or advanced credentials like a PhD, you may find the role's level and scope don't match your career stage. We want to ensure the position offers appropriate growth and challenge, and candidates with significantly more experience often find it doesn't meet those needs.

Details

• Compensation:
  • NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $113,000
  • All other U.S. locations: $102,500
  • UK or Canada: We'll convert the non-New York/Bay Area U.S. salary into local currency using historical USD exchange rates.
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad.
  • Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California, Brooklyn, NYC, or London, UK.
  • International applicants: For this role, we can currently only hire team members based in the UK, Canada, or the United States who have prior work authorization. We cannot support visas for this role at this time.  
  • 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.
• 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
  • Four months 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 (including internationally) 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 plan to work with staff who have family or other obligations.
• Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.

Hiring Process

After the initial application, our application process uses a mixture of interviews and work trials, the first of which is anonymized before grading. 

The work trials in our process allow us to better understand how applicants’ skills will translate to the work we do and allows you to learn more about our work. They also reduce bias in our hiring process — we’re better able to hire candidates with nontraditional backgrounds who nonetheless excel in our trials.

Our typical interview process for this role includes the following stages, though we may adjust based on the specific needs of the search:

• Initial application: Our application asks for basic information about you and why you are applying, as well as a number of questions designed to help us assess your fit for the role. We request that you include a resumé. We do not plan to review other materials, like cover letters or letters of recommendation, so we encourage you not to submit these.
• Spreadsheet take-home assignment: You'll complete a capacity-planning exercise similar to the work Project Managerss do when helping teams organize projects and timelines. This should take no more than 90 minutes.
• Initial interview: If you move forward, we’ll invite you to a 25-minute call with someone from our recruiting team to talk through your thought process on the spreadsheet assignment and dig into any questions they have about your background.
• Work history interview: You will have an interview with 1-2 people from our hiring team. In one, you’ll meet with the two hiring managers for this role to talk about your own work experience and you’ll get a chance to ask any questions you have.
• Coordinating an RFP work trial: This will be a set of live role-playing meetings with our hiring team, accompanied by about 30 minutes of at-home preparation and 80 minutes of post-meeting work. This exercise should take approximately 2.5 hours total and you will be compensated at a flat rate of $115.
• Values interview: In the final interview, you’ll meet with someone from our research team and discuss your own and GiveWell’s values.
• Reference checks: The final step in our process is to request and contact two references. If possible, we prefer for at least one reference to be a former or current manager.

You will receive communication about whether you are advancing after each stage of the process. We strive to respond to applications within two weeks across all stages of the process; however, we expect a large volume of applications for this particular position and may not be able to achieve our desired response times. Let us know if you have specific circumstances (e.g., a competing offer or tighter timeline) that could impact timing. 

Please note that this role was previously titled "Program Associate." The position itself remains unchanged — we updated the title to "Project Manager" to better reflect the nature of the work.

If you have questions about the process before you begin, feel free to reach out to us at careers@givewell.org.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Researchers 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.

Researchers will have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researcher or Senior 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.

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, Researchers 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 or Senior 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. Senior 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 ~60 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 Researchers 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 ~60-person team 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.

Details

• Team: You'll join one of our grantmaking teams (see our org structure here) and report to a Senior Researcher or Senior Program Officer.
• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $184,500
• All other U.S. locations: $167,500
• International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency.
• 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.

About you

Our typical hire for this role has a master's degree in a quantitative field (e.g., economics, policy, public health) with a few years of relevant experience, or a PhD in a quantitative field with limited post-graduation experience. We're willing to make exceptions for applicants who don't have advanced degrees but demonstrate equivalent depth of expertise.

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.

Other notes

• Please note that our hiring process consists of the same work trials for the following roles: Senior Researcher, Senior Malaria Researcher, and Researcher. If, within the last year, you applied and were rejected for one of these roles, you should hold off on applying to the other roles, unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our team. If you're interested in all of these roles, please just apply once and note in your application that you'd like to be considered for the other roles, too.
• Please note that this role was previously titled "Senior Research Associate." The position itself remains unchanged.
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise, two compensated work trials, and several short interviews. You can see more details about our hiring process on our FAQs page!
• 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 at this stage, but please email us at careers@givewell.org with any questions not answered here!

Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Senior Researchers to help us direct hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective global health and poverty alleviation programs. As part of our lean research team, you will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

You’ll create and lead ambitious research agendas, answer complex questions, and inform high-impact grantmaking decisions by combining rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

Some Senior Researchers may eventually choose to transition into an equivalently-leveled Senior Program Officer role to lead a large grantmaking portfolio, while others choose to stay focused on leading significant research agendas. We’re open to a wide variety of internal development options depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

Senior Researchers are the intellectual leaders of GiveWell’s work. In this role, you’ll join a small senior team in setting 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. You’ll also communicate externally about our work and mentor and advise other members of the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions GiveWell faces. You’ll execute that agenda by combining thorough review of empirical evidence, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and 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?

After gaining experience on the team, Senior Researchers 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 Senior Program Officer role, which is a lateral move—we don’t conceptualize the Senior Researcher role as a training ground for program work. All of GiveWell's Senior Program Officers are also researchers with strong technical training and a penchant for sketching out a model when they’re not sure how to approach a problem.

Senior Program Officers typically own high-impact, cost-effective grantmaking portfolios by deepening their expertise, growing their networks, and understanding the broader context within a specific grantmaking area. They 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 60 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 Researchers without knowing which subteam they’ll eventually sit on. We aim to expose our new senior team members to different types of work and parts of the team over several months to inform their eventual subteam placement. (If you bring specific, specialized expertise, consider applying to one of our specialized Senior Researcher positions). 

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 over 60 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

Senior Researchers 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 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 research comes under scrutiny.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird 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.
• You constantly assess whether you and the team are working on the most important things.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $241,000.
• All other U.S. locations: $219,000.
• 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 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
• 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 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.

Miscellaneous details:

• Please note that our hiring process consists of the same work trials for the following roles: Senior Researcher, Senior Malaria Researcher, and Researcher. If, within the last year, you applied and were rejected for one of these roles, you should hold off on applying to the other roles, unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our team. If you're interested in all of these roles, please just apply once and note in your application that you'd like to be considered for the other roles, too.
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of 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 have a strong preference for full-time applicants, but we sometimes consider applications for part-time work on a case-by-case basis. We aren’t interested in reviewing applications for contract or project-based work at this time.
• 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—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.

Summary

GiveWell's senior research staff are the key decision makers for hundreds of millions of dollars in grantmaking, and we think growing that team is one of the most important things we can do to increase our impact. We're seeking one or more Senior Recruiters to help us do that.

Finding senior research staff is a hard problem for a couple reasons:

• The talent pool for GiveWell researchers basically doesn’t exist as a defined group. You can’t go to one type of program, industry, or a few obvious competitors to build a reliable pipeline. The people who succeed here come from a wide range of backgrounds — economics PhDs, policy analysts, management consultants, medical doctors, neuroscientists, primate biologists, etc. — and the roles don't have clean analogues elsewhere. What they share is a set of hard-to-measure cognitive skills and quantitative fluency that doesn’t show up reliably on resumes.
• Our process is very competitive. The offer rate for senior research roles is less than one in a thousand.

We want you to figure out where to find strong candidates, improve our assessment process, and do the hands-on work of sourcing, screening, and closing offers. You'll work very closely with our research leadership team. We're most excited about finding someone who helps us make better decisions about finding great talent — and hire them faster.

The role

You'd work closely with our research team leaders to own recruiting for our Researcher, Program Officer, Senior Researcher, and Senior Program Officer roles. A few problems we’ll want you to think about: 

After candidates apply, is our assessment process effective? Our offer rate for senior roles is below 0.1%. That might mean we’re extremely selective. It might also mean we’re losing good candidates somewhere in the funnel. You’ll dig into our data and find answers (How well do early screening scores predict work trial performance? What are the most common rejection reasons, and are they signal or noise? How did past hires actually turn out?). You’ll help us develop good heuristics about what to do in situations when candidates’ signals are mixed.

Where do we even find good candidates? The ideal GiveWell researcher doesn’t come from one degree program, industry, or competitor. You’ll think about where to look and go after them. And you’ll continually develop new pipelines with creative methods (running structured referral conversations with our researchers, scouring conference guest lists, using sourcing tools creatively, or maybe vibe-coding your own).

How can we use data to make better decisions? Right now, we don’t have great visibility into which sourcing channels, process changes, or pipeline stages are driving results. You’ll track data, run analyses, and help us make evidence-based decisions about where to put effort. In some cases, you might find out that we don’t have the right data architecture to answer important questions, so you’ll build it.

What are ways our hiring process could be much better? This is harder to describe because it covers ~every strategic and tactical question we face. We want you to be thinking about all of it. Things like: Are we overweighting particular qualities and losing promising candidates without noticing? How could we run experiments on our hiring processes (randomization, A/B testing, sourcing campaigns) that actually give us useful information?

You’ll also do a fair amount of bread-and-butter recruiting work: screening applications, writing outreach emails, and interviewing candidates. We think that sort of work will keep you close to the data and help you develop strong pattern recognition.

About you

You’re excited about GiveWell's mission and methods. You think GiveWell is doing something special, not just generically “doing good.” You can explain what makes GiveWell different.

You’re careful and truth-seeking with your beliefs. For example, if a hiring manager says we need to find “scrappy” people, you’re likely to ask “Why do you believe that?” or “What does scrappy mean?” instead of uncritically agreeing. You’re quick to update your beliefs by picking up new information and asking sharper questions. You can probably tell us about times when you’ve changed your mind about important things.

You're unusually curious and analytical. When you get invested in a question, you keep trying to find the right answer after many other people would have stopped. You ground your beliefs in data when possible and hedge appropriately when you’re not confident.

You have very high standards. We have a high competence bar for our research team, and you’ll need to uphold that and own your decisions about applications that do and don’t meet our bar.

You’re entrepreneurial and high agency. You figure things out. You have a history of solving problems. You’re very resourceful. You’re more likely to make the mistake of moving too fast than moving too slow. You'd rather try something imperfect and learn from it than wait for a perfect plan.

You're direct. You say what you actually think even when it's uncomfortable.

You’re good at communicating in writing. You're concise, clear, and you don't hide behind jargon. You probably enjoy an effective memo.

If you think people who know you well would agree that many of the qualities above describe you, we’d like you to apply.

Qualifications

We care much more about the qualities described above than any specific background. That said, some things that might help:

• Experience in recruiting, talent operations, research operations, or a generalist role at a mission-driven organization
• Comfort with data — spreadsheets and basic quantitative analysis
• Strong written communication
• Experience working closely with executive-level leadership
• Familiarity with global health, development economics, effective altruism, or adjacent fields is a plus but not required

Recruiting experience is welcome but not required. Some of the best people in comparable roles at peer organizations came in without it. And we’ll support you if you want to move on to other things at GiveWell after making progress on our research recruiting. There's always a place here for generalists who are good at solving hard problems, and we have a history of developing high performers into different roles across our org.

Key Questions

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

• GiveWell has a unique approach to hiring, and it’s possible that you’ll dislike it. For example, we tend to lean heavily into work trials and finding empirical evidence about the candidates we hire. We are rigorous in how we evaluate candidates, and hold really high standards, which can lead to longer hiring rounds with more steps than what is typical elsewhere. We’re extremely quality focused and would rather hold out for the right candidate than settle on someone who’s “mostly right.”
• You’ll need to deeply understand our work and culture to succeed. We want you to be able to speak with candidates about our work and what makes GiveWell special, and provide useful input to hiring managers when we’re developing assessments and evaluating candidates. 
• You will be expected to hunt, not just farm. While we receive a high volume of inbound applicants, we are looking for recruiters who effectively source and attract candidates, not just wait for them to trickle in. 
• You’ll be collaborating with leaders with high expectations. We’re a founder-led, performance-driven culture and you’ll be collaborating with our executive team regularly in this role. Strong partnerships will depend on you building trust, leading with curiosity, and reliably delivering results.
• You’ll be running hiring rounds from start to finish. We consider this a full-lifecycle role, which means you should be comfortable with things like scheduling, building out roles in Greenhouse, and day-to-day coordination with candidates. While you might have support from more junior colleagues, you’ll be expected to capably manage your own pipelines. 

What does growth look like in this role?

GiveWell’s growing, and you’re going to help shape that. Your growth will be tied directly to the impact created by the people you help hire. Beyond day-to-day recruiting, you’ll have the opportunity to work on more strategic projects, including shaping our overall hiring approach and improving our employer brand. In this role you’ll also have significant exposure to executive leadership and many corners of our business. The talent acquisition team is doubling in 2026, which means there are clear opportunities for mentorship and potentially growing into a team leader.

What does this interview process entail?

We'll use a combination of interviews, written exercises, and work trials to assess the qualities described above. Past versions have looked like:

• Simulating a hiring manager intake conversation
• Walking through a sourcing strategy for a hard-to-fill role
• Reviewing a job description or process and offering a critique
• Writing a candidate outreach email or internal communication

We'll share more specific details if we invite you to move forward, but our current plan is:

• Screen with a member of the Talent Acquisition team
• Career history interview with the Manager, Talent Acquisition
• Work trial, which will include live conversations and written work
• Values interview with VP, People
• Final conversation with Manager, Talent Acquisition
• References

Team structure

This role sits on GiveWell's People team and reports to our Manager of Talent Acquisition. Day-to-day, you'd work in close partnership with our Research Program Director, who owns senior research hiring decisions and is part of our Research Leadership Team. You'd collaborate regularly with other members of the People and Research teams on sourcing and candidate evaluation.

We'll likely also want you to attend research team meetings, develop 1:1 relationships with research team members, and potentially join research team-building retreats. We’ll be interested in ~any kind of team embedding that helps you build useful context.

The details

• Compensation:
  • NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $149,600
  • All other U.S. locations: $136,000
• 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
• Location: You must be based in the United States and can choose to work remotely, hybrid or in person at one of our offices located in Brooklyn, NY or Oakland, CA.
• 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.
• Travel: GiveWell hosts “Visit Weeks” twice a year in our Oakland, California, office and up to two annual departmental retreats. Attending these in-person opportunities will be important to fulfilling the goals of this role. Occasional additional travel may be helpful for conferences or recruiting events.
• Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.
• 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.

We don't want to miss candidates who could do great things at GiveWell. If you're on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications, we encourage you to apply anyway.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. We value our team's diversity in all respects and desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org.

The Role

We’re hiring a Salesforce Administrator to support internal users, continuously improve user experience and data quality, and ensure data reliability and consistency across our Salesforce instance. The Salesforce Administrator will fully own the support, maintenance, and roadmap of core products leveraging Salesforce NPSP, and provide front-line support for our custom Salesforce app.

Why we’re hiring this role right now:  GiveWell's fundraising and grants management work depends heavily on Salesforce to operate effectively and scale our impact. Our Technology team currently has only one Salesforce Administrator, and the volume of day-to-day support requests has left little room for proactive improvements such as reducing technical debt, improving data quality, or building new features that would meaningfully benefit our growing organization. As GiveWell grows and our use of Salesforce expands, particularly in grants management, we expect demand to outpace what a single administrator can sustainably support. We're looking for someone who can share the support load, bring additional depth to the team, and help us continuously improve the systems that underpin our life-saving work.

As our Salesforce Administrator, you’ll support:

• Outreach CRM 
• Gift/Donation Processing System
• Grants administration
• Service Console/Case Management 
• Reports & Dashboards

Specific duties will include: 

Salesforce Support

• Serve as the primary point of contact for all Salesforce support requests, resolving issues in a timely manner and/or routing requests for products maintained by other teammates
• Proactively monitor Salesforce performance and initiate troubleshooting when necessary
• Manage onboarding/offboarding and permission modifications
• Support teams with reporting and dashboards
• Design and deliver walkthroughs and training to educate staff
• Escalate bugs and larger process issues to senior SF teammates
• Create and share documentation to help teammates use SF effectively
• Identify and suggest areas for improvement

Database maintenance

• Own data quality including setting up monitoring systems to identify problematic data streams/automations and eliminate errors
• Perform data uploads using tools like DataLoader
• Perform exploratory data analysis to expose data quality problems and resolve them
• Drive duplicate management in partnership with our fundraising team
• Handle and manage data with an eye to upholding our privacy, security, and data management standards

About You

The strongest candidates will have one to three years of professional experience as a dedicated Salesforce Administrator along with some prior professional experience in customer-facing roles. In addition to relevant experience with the responsibilities listed above, we’ll be looking for someone with:

• A strong technical understanding of Salesforce, especially as deployed in NPSP
• Familiarity with integrations and packages used with Salesforce, especially for non-profits (e.g., Form Assembly, G-Connector, Zapier, Cirrus, and donation payment platforms)
• Extensive experience providing support to all kinds of users (e.g., from entry-level staff to senior leadership)
• Prior experience working on a small, collaborative team with a high ownership culture, preferably in a non-profit organization
• Knowledge of data integrity within Salesforce and familiarity with strategies to drive data quality
• Skills in report building and dashboard development
• Experience helping users improve how they use Salesforce through training and tutorials
• Proven ability to put together effective and engaging enablement resources like videos, guides, and other forms of documentation  
• A clear prioritization framework and ability to meet deadlines, act with urgency, and manage trade-offs with great judgement
• Experience working within project management software (we use Asana)

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

• Customer service excellence: You feel like you’ve done a good job when your teammates are served quickly, fully, and with thoughtfulness
• Sense of stewardship: You feel responsible for the outcomes of the work that you do. As a result, you act proactively and actively model the level of care and discretion required of someone in a tech admin role
• Listening skills: You are able to translate a user’s description of the issue into something you can take action on from a technical perspective. You have empathy for various staff needs and challenges
• Communication skills: You are really good at asking effective clarifying questions, you convey statuses and updates across the team when needed, you give users clear guidance and instructions, and you excel at conveying technical concepts to non-technical audiences
• Problem-solving skills: You have honed the art of troubleshooting user issues, and have a good sense of when to dive in and figure it out and when to escalate and reach out for help
• Organizational skills: You have great attention to detail, thrive on creating systems and scalable workflows, and keep meticulous records of your work. You properly utilize our collaboration and project management tools
• Prioritization skills: You maintain your composure and structure even when juggling multiple high-priority demands and have excellent judgment in figuring out what’s most important

Details

• Team: You’ll report to the Head of Technology and will be part of our Salesforce team, which includes one other Salesforce professional and one support Admin
• Compensation:
  • Annual salary in NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $108,800, in all other US locations: $98,600 
• Location:
  • You must be based in the United States and can choose to work remotely, hybrid or in person at one of our offices located in Brooklyn, NY or Oakland, CA
  • 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
  • International applicants: For this role, we can currently only hire team members based in the United States who have prior work authorization. We cannot support visas for this role at this time.  
• 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 co-working space memberships
  • 403(b) retirement plan
• Travel: GiveWell hosts “Visit Weeks” twice a year in our Oakland, California, office and up to two annual departmental retreats. Attending these in-person opportunities will be important to fulfilling the goals of this role. Otherwise, no travel is expected for this role
• 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
• Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role

Key Questions & Information

What does success look like in this role?

The primary responsibilities of this role are to deliver exceptional support to our internal users, enhance user enablement, and maintain high data quality within Salesforce. Success in this role will be evaluated based on these key areas.

What is the structure of the team I’d be joining?

You will report directly to our Head of Tech. You’ll be joining a team with two other Salesforce professionals, one who provides support and the other who leads building solutions. You will collaborate to provide support alongside our existing support teammate. Naturally, your work will intersect with that of your colleagues, so coordination and communication will be key.  

Do I need certifications to apply?

For this role, we value experience over certifications. If you are a Salesforce Certified Administrator, you could be a good fit with the right applicable experience, but we don’t require this certification for the role. 

Would I be responsible for gift processing?

We know that at some organizations Salesforce Administrators are responsible for processing gifts of donations. At GiveWell, we have a dedicated gift processing team who you will work with and support, but this role won’t be directly responsible for those tasks. 

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

The majority of the needed work in Salesforce will focus on support, training, and data quality. If you are looking for a role where building Salesforce apps is the majority of what you do day-to-day, this role may not be the best fit. 

What is the hiring process like?

The steps in the hiring process are described below. Please note that we could choose not to move forward at any stage after application review. We plan to devote significant staff effort to reviewing applications, and we’ll respond to everyone who applies. 

• Application
• Initial 30-minute interview with member of Talent Acquisition Team
• Work sample submission and review
• Work sample follow up interview with Head of Tech
• Technical interview with two members of our Tech Team
• GiveWell Values interview
• Final Interview with Head of Tech
• Reference checks
• Offer

Summary

GiveWell is growing fast to move more donations to where we think they will do exceptional good for people in need. But it takes unique talent to thrive here, and finding those candidates requires much more than posting jobs and screening resumes. We're hiring a Senior Recruiter who will actively search for exceptional people, uphold an extremely high bar, and serve as a true thought partner to leaders across the organization — because the quality of our hires is key to how many lives we can save and improve.

Why we're hiring for this role right now: GiveWell surpassed 100 employees in early 2026, and we’re continuing to grow. We have increased hiring goals in Operations and Outreach, and we’re building capacity to tackle that. As our hiring scales, we’re also investing in improving our approach with smarter sourcing, a stronger employer brand, and creating hiring infrastructure. This is a real opportunity to help shape what great recruiting looks like at a mission-driven organization that takes hiring seriously.

The role

As a Senior Recruiter, you’ll be a hunter for rare talent and the right organizational fit — one week building a sourcing strategy for a niche finance role, the next networking to find a senior communications candidate or learning a new function well enough to advise a hiring manager on what “great” looks like. You’ll own full-cycle recruiting for roles across GiveWell's Operations and Outreach functions — think Finance, Legal, Tech, Philanthropy, and Communications — and pitch in on research recruiting when needed. Day to day, you’ll work across multiple job openings on the following:

• Partnering with hiring managers. You’ll collaborate closely with GiveWell leaders to define what they’re looking for in their new hires, guide them through our processes, monitor and surface trends in our talent pools, and make better hiring decisions. 
• Building our top of the funnel. You’re a hunter. You seek out passive talent through targeted sourcing, referrals, networking, and events and utilize all the tools at your disposal to prospect. You’ll get in front of high-quality candidates and creatively attract them to GiveWell, not just wait for them to trickle in. 
• Creating hiring infrastructure. Everything from crafting compelling job descriptions to designing interview plans that lead to stronger signals and less noise. You’ll help sharpen the tools we use to evaluate candidates, train hiring teams on how to use them, and measure their effectiveness.
• Candidate management. You’ll be the point of contact for candidates at every point in our hiring process. You’re responsible for creating a candidate experience that is frictionless, speedy, and showcases GiveWell’s values and culture.
• Assessing talent. You’ll use your strong judgement, curiosity, and critical thinking to assess talent. You’ll regularly lead screening interviews and be trusted to jump in at later stages as part of the hiring team that upholds GiveWell’s standards.
• Project and timeline management. You keep hiring teams on track, loop in the right people along the way, and effectively manage competing priorities within the diverse teams you support.

You’ll also plan substantial time thinking about our recruiting challenges, and contributing to our overall hiring strategy. Some of the questions you’ll focus on: 

• What makes our top performers unique, and where can we find more of them? You are obsessed with understanding the qualities, skills, and experiences needed to drive impact at GiveWell and it’s your mission to find more candidates who possess them and get them into our funnel.
• How do we make better decisions, faster? You’ll track data, spot patterns, and help us understand which parts of our process are adding value and which aren’t. If we don’t have the right information to answer an important question, you’ll build the infrastructure to get it.
• How can we set new hires up for success? Your job doesn’t ‘stop’ when an offer is signed. You’re focused on developing smooth handoffs, understanding new-hire sentiment and performance, and ensuring a warm welcome to GiveWell.
• What could we be doing much better? This is harder to describe because it covers ~every strategic and tactical question we face. We want you to be thinking about all of it. Things like: Are we overweighting particular qualities and losing promising candidates without noticing? How could we run experiments on our hiring processes (randomization, A/B testing, sourcing campaigns) that actually give us useful information?

About You

The strongest candidates will have 3+ years of professional experience recruiting for hard-to-fill positions in a performance-driven environment. Beyond that, here’s what we’re really looking for:

You’re excited about GiveWell’s mission and methods. You think GiveWell is doing something special, not just generically “doing good” and that matters to you, personally. You can explain what makes GiveWell different, and are fascinated by what makes a candidate successful here. You are intent on finding more top performers and won’t settle for less.

You’re entrepreneurial and high agency. You are great at identifying opportunities to drive progress forward, faster. You notice gaps, ask good questions, and find solutions. If you’ve ever redesigned a broken process, built a sourcing strategy from scratch, or pushed back on a hiring manager because you had a better idea, that's the kind of energy we're looking for.

Adaptability and curiosity. You adjust your approach to recruiting based on what each role and hiring manager actually needs — not a formula you apply to everything. You’re genuinely curious about the work happening across GiveWell, and that curiosity shows up in how you engage with candidates and hiring teams alike.

Strong communication. You write and speak with accuracy and the right tone. Internally, that means being concise and specific. Externally, it means writing outreach that actually gets responses and navigating discussions with sophisticated candidates.

Solid judgment. You’re an expert at assessing candidates’ behaviors and patterns and making excellent judgment calls, even in ambiguous situations. You personally hold high standards and seek to elevate the teams you support, and should have a point of view (that you can back up!) on what makes a strong candidate.

Highly organized. You’re meticulous in how you prepare, document, and track your work. You love a well-run meeting and a clean spreadsheet.

While not required, we’re particularly interested in candidates who possess:

• Experience recruiting for a range of functions — operations, fundraising, finance, communications, tech, etc. in a high performing organization
• Project/program management experience
• Strong analytical skills: ATS reporting, spreadsheets, and translating numbers and patterns into decisions and insights
• Experience working closely with executive-level leadership and cross functional stakeholders
• Experience designing, conducting, and improving interview and assessment processes 
• An interest in HR Business Partner or Talent Development work
• Familiarity with Greenhouse, LinkedIn Recruiter, or similar tools is a plus
• Prior mentorship experience (or an interest in it!)

Key Questions

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

GiveWell has a unique approach to hiring, and it’s possible that you’ll dislike it. For example, we tend to lean heavily into work trials and finding empirical evidence about the candidates we hire. We are rigorous in how we evaluate candidates, and hold really high standards, which can lead to longer hiring rounds with more steps than what is typical elsewhere. We’re extremely quality focused and would rather hold out for the right candidate than settle on someone who’s “mostly right.”

• You’ll need to deeply understand our work and culture to succeed. We want you to be able to speak with candidates about our work and what makes GiveWell special, and provide useful input to hiring managers when we’re developing assessments and evaluating candidates. 
• You will be expected to hunt, not just farm. While we receive a high volume of inbound applicants, we are looking for recruiters who effectively source and attract candidates, not just wait for them to trickle in. 
• You’ll be collaborating with leaders with high expectations. We’re a founder-led, performance-driven culture and you’ll be collaborating with our executive team regularly in this role. Strong partnerships will depend on you building trust, leading with curiosity, and reliably delivering results.
• You’ll be running hiring rounds from start to finish. We consider this a full-lifecycle role, which means you should be comfortable with things like scheduling, building out roles in Greenhouse, and day-to-day coordination with candidates. While you might have support from more junior colleagues, you’ll be expected to capably manage your own pipelines. 

What does growth look like in this role?

GiveWell’s growing, and you’re going to help shape that. Your growth will be tied directly to the impact created by the people you help hire. Beyond day-to-day recruiting, you’ll have the opportunity to work on more strategic projects, including shaping our overall hiring approach and improving our employer brand. In this role you’ll also have significant exposure to executive leadership and many corners of our business. The talent acquisition team is doubling in 2026, which means there are clear opportunities for mentorship and potentially growing into a team leader.

What does this interview process entail?

We'll use a combination of interviews, written exercises, and work trials to assess the qualities described above. Past versions have looked like:

• Simulating a hiring manager intake conversation
• Walking through a sourcing strategy for a hard-to-fill role
• Reviewing a job description or process and offering a critique
• Writing a candidate outreach email or internal communication

We'll share more specific details if we invite you to move forward, but our current plan is:

• Screen with a member of the Talent Acquisition team
• Career history interview with the Manager, Talent Acquisition
• Work trial, which will include live conversations and written work
• Values interview with VP, People
• Final conversation with Manager, Talent Acquisition
• References

The details

• Compensation:
  • NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $149,600
  • All other U.S. locations: $136,000
• 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
• Location: You must be based in the United States and can choose to work remotely, hybrid or in person at one of our offices located in Brooklyn, NY or Oakland, CA.
• 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.
• Travel: GiveWell hosts “Visit Weeks” twice a year in our Oakland, California, office and up to two annual departmental retreats. Attending these in-person opportunities will be important to fulfilling the goals of this role. Occasional additional travel may be helpful for conferences or recruiting events.
• Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.
• 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.

We don't want to miss candidates who could do great things at GiveWell. If you're on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications, we encourage you to apply anyway.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. We value our team's diversity in all respects and desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org.

If you're passionate about GiveWell's work but none of our currently open roles feel like a strong fit, we encourage you to submit your general information to our Talent Pool.

We'll periodically review applications to the Talent Pool and reach out directly if we identify a role that may be a good fit. We may also email you with updates about new job openings.

Please note that we do not commit to updating you on the status of your Talent Pool application—unlike in our role-specific hiring rounds, we do not have a set timeline or process with which we review applications.