Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Senior Researchers to join our Cross-Cutting team—which is responsible for tackling thorny methodological questions, pressure-testing our conclusions, and ensuring research quality as we scale. You'll work on problems that span all of GiveWell's grantmaking areas and shape how we think about cost-effectiveness, uncertainty, and impact.

This role is ideal for researchers who thrive on variety and complexity: one month you might be developing frameworks for comparing health interventions to poverty alleviation programs, the next you could be designing a "lookback" study to assess whether our past grants achieved their intended impact, and after that you might be figuring out how to incorporate local field insights into our cost-effectiveness models.

As part of our research team, you will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

The Role

GiveWell’s research team aims to find and fund the most cost-effective giving opportunities in global health and development. While our grantmaking teams are focused on funding programs in their specific areas (malaria, vaccines, nutrition, water, livelihoods, and new areas), the cross-cutting team addresses research questions that span across different areas of our work.

In this role, you'll shape and execute a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to questions like:

Hard research questions

• How should we value averting a death versus improving health outcomes versus increasing income? (Our "moral weights" problem)
• How do we estimate burden of disease and population when underlying data sources contradict each other or are unreliable?
• How should we set our cost-effectiveness bar over time when funding and spending vary unpredictably year to year?
• How should we advise donors on whether to give now or later?
• How should we account for high levels of uncertainty in our cost-effectiveness estimates? When does uncertainty change a funding decision?
• How should we model spillover effects—do health programs affect income, and vice versa? Are we consistent in how we handle this across program areas?
• What discount rate should we use?
• How concerned should we be that the organizations we fund are diverting healthcare workers from government systems? What about other unintended consequences of our grantmaking?

Verification and learning

• Are our grants actually achieving what we predicted? How do we know?
• What can intensive "lookbacks" on past grants teach us about where our models are systematically wrong?
• We've seen potential issues like caseload inflation in malnutrition programs, unreliable chlorination coverage data, and questions about bed net distribution accuracy—how do we catch these problems earlier?
• How do we systematically incorporate field insights, monitoring data, and external feedback into our work?
• Which types of external feedback actually change our minds?
• Where are the blind spots in our research that we haven't even identified yet?
• How do we design M&E systems that tell us whether grants are working, not just whether grantees are reporting what we asked for?
• How accurate are our forecasts? Where are we well-calibrated versus overconfident? How can we improve our forecasting skills?

Building research infrastructure

• How do we train new researchers to be productive within weeks, not months, as we scale from 50 to 100+ people?
• What AI tools could reduce research time by 40%+ without sacrificing quality?
• Can we simplify our cost-effectiveness models for routine grants while preserving rigor for novel or high-stakes decisions?
• How do we build field networks in our top countries that give us "ground truth" on what's actually happening with our grants?
• What would it look like to have easy-to-use databases of M&E data, burden estimates, and lookback findings that any researcher could query?

Unlike our grantmaking teams that develop deep expertise in specific program areas, Cross-Cutting researchers see across all of GiveWell's work. You'll collaborate with every team, spot inconsistencies in how we're making decisions across areas, and serve as an internal check on our reasoning. You'll also play a key role in maintaining research quality as GiveWell scales. This means developing tools and processes that help the entire research team work faster without sacrificing rigor.

Team structure

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

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

Cross-Cutting Senior Researcher vs. other Senior Researcher roles

We're hiring Senior Researchers for both our Cross-Cutting team and our grantmaking teams (Malaria, Nutrition, Water, Vaccines, Livelihoods, and New Areas). If you're energized by variety and methodological questions that span multiple program areas, Cross-Cutting may be a better fit. If you're excited to develop deep expertise in a specific program area and eventually own a grantmaking portfolio, our general Senior Researcher role may be better.

Not sure? Apply to whichever sounds more appealing—we'll help you figure out the right fit during the process, and we're open to moving candidates between tracks.

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

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.
• 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: Researcher, Senior Researcher, Senior Cross-Cutting Researcher, Senior Livelihoods Researcher, Senior Malaria Researcher, Senior New Areas Researcher, Senior Nutrition Researcher, Senior Vaccination Researcher, and Senior Water 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’re aiming to hire four to six full-time Senior Researchers.
• 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.