GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025.
The role
Senior Program Officers are the leaders of GiveWell's grantmaking. In this role, you'll take primary responsibility for a significant grantmaking portfolio, setting its strategy and sifting through the many opportunities we could fund to focus 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 build and lead a grantmaking portfolio that brings rigor and creativity to GiveWell's hardest funding problems. You'll combine rigorous review of empirical evidence, cost-effectiveness modeling, strong grantee relationships, ground-truthing of how programs are actually delivered, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment to decide what to fund, how to structure it, and when to build something new. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:
How should we balance exploring and seeding new, smaller opportunities with funding cost-effective opportunities at scale today?
When the best opportunity doesn't exist yet, how do we create it, whether through co-design, seeding an implementer, or shaping broader incentives?
What is the best direction for our portfolio, and are we correctly prioritizing the programs and grantees we fund?
Where are the highest-impact opportunities to expand the portfolio while improving its cost-effectiveness?
How can we triangulate empirical evidence against expert opinion and other qualitative features, like a grantee's organizational track record?
Do a grantee's reported outputs reflect real coverage, quality, and adherence to evidence-based practices on the ground?
What research can we fund today that could substantially improve our grantmaking five years from now?
How much uncertainty are we willing to accept before making a grant, and which questions do we need to answer first?Senior Program Officers work closely with Senior Researchers, an equivalently-leveled, parallel role on our team. Senior Researchers typically set the research agenda for grantmaking areas and tackle the thorniest, most open-ended questions we face, while Senior Program Officers own the grant and portfolio decisions — deciding what we fund and why, and incorporating Senior Researchers' analysis into their decisionmaking. Senior Program Officers have a research mindset, too: they're comfortable digging into a cost-effectiveness model and forming their own view of the evidence.
Team structure
Our research department 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 some cases, we’ll make offers for specific subteam placements. In others, we’ll offer the opportunity to complete a few rotations on different teams over several months before settling on a final subteam placement. We’ll discuss placement details in the final stages of the hiring process.
Team values
We think our research team has unique qualities:
We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values. We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.
We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.
We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.
Lean research team = huge personal impact. Our research team of just under 70 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
The strongest candidates typically have at least 5-10 years of professional experience, a significant portion of which was in similar or closely-related roles. Many of our senior staff have quantitatively-oriented advanced degrees, but there’s no hard academic requirement — what matters to us is that you’ve used empirical tools to make rigorous, evidence-based decisions under uncertainty, whether you’ve done that in graduate training or hands-on experience.
In addition to relevant experience with the responsibilities listed above, we'll be interested in people with strong track records in any of the following areas:
Funding, building or scaling new programs, initiatives, or organizations.
Using rigorous quantitative analysis and cost-effectiveness modeling to support decisionmaking
Building relationships with diverse stakeholders (you'll work with other funders, research organizations, NGOs, and more, so it will be important for you to have strong skill in this area)
Owning large budgets and/or grant portfolios
Excellent written and verbal communication, with an emphasis on directness and clarity
Setting and iterating on strategy in complex, fast moving environments It’s a plus, but not required, if you have experience:
Engaging with global health, development, or related fields
Reviewing randomized controlled trials and impact evaluations
Working with governments or multilateral organizations
Gathering first-hand data to inform program design
Managing a variety of grant types, including advocacy and market-shaping initiativesYou 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 get things done, and you'll drop what you're doing when something matters more. You drive work to conclusions efficiently, and when the evidence shifts or a higher-value opportunity appears, you’re eager to pivot.
You're entrepreneurial. When you see a gap, you want to fill it, whether that's designing a new program, finding an implementer, or setting up a new kind of funding mechanism. You make bets under uncertainty.
You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that 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.The details
Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $308,000.
All other U.S. locations: $280,000.
International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency.
Benefits: Our benefits include:
Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
Four weeks of paid time off per year
16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely.
Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to any of our physical office locations.
International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. A successful candidate will need to commit to a work schedule that has some overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.
Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.
Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences (on average 1-2 per year), with additional travel for those interested in traveling more. Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend annual department retreats and twice-annual whole org visit weeks to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and we’ll accommodate staff who have conflicting obligations.
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.Miscellaneous details:
Please note that our hiring process relies on some (not all) of the same work trials that we use in our Researcher and Senior Researcher roles (including team-specific Senior Researcher postings). If you applied to one of these roles within the last year, you should hold off on applying to others unless our team reaches out directly. If you're interested in multiple 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.About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and funding outstanding giving opportunities in global health and development, sharing the full details of our analysis with everyone for free. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.6 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we’ve directed will save more than 340,000 lives.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.
GiveWell grants have:
Helped governments to implement high-impact health programs, like in-line chlorination of drinking water in India and HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator and Evidence Action’s Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Tested our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.We never take for granted that GiveWell’s work is good for the world. We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research and external analysis to address our uncertainties and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell’s Privacy Statement for Applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell’s Work Trial Policy.