Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
Summary
GiveWell is seeking a Senior Nutrition Researcher to help direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective nutrition 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 nutrition grantmaking currently spans three sub-portfolios: Vitamin A Supplementation (VAS), iron supplementation (including iron and folic acid supplementation and large-scale food fortification), and treatment of acute malnutrition (CMAM/wasting treatment). In 2025, we directed $95 million to implementers across these areas, operating primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. We are actively deepening our work across all three areas, by scrutinising program coverage and quality, strengthening our cost-effectiveness models, considering different delivery platforms, and expanding our grantmaking to new geographies. We are also exploring opportunities to expand our grantmaking into interventions adjacent to our existing portfolios, as well as approaches and programs that are entirely new to GiveWell, where the evidence and cost-effectiveness case is compelling.
As a Senior Nutrition 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 nutrition. 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 nutrition 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:
Tackle thorny research questions in our existing portfolios.
For example: how should we calibrate our cost-effectiveness estimates to real-world program performance? How do we better understand coverage gaps and program quality across VAS, iron supplementation, and CMAM programs? How can we strengthen the evidence on the impact of VAS and CMAM in modern contexts, when many key trials are decades old but it would be unethical to withhold standard of care in new trials?
Design and oversee learning grants.
You'll help design impact evaluations for new and existing programs, and supervise researchers executing that work — from scoping the research question through to interpreting results and integrating them into our models.
Build our evidence base in new programmatic areas.
This includes synthesising existing research, commissioning new research, and in some cases funding primary data collection — with the goal of determining whether a new intervention meets GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar and is ready for major grantmaking.
Provide research support to grantmakers.
You'll ensure our cost-effectiveness models reflect our best current understanding of the programs we fund, by stress-testing assumptions, incorporating new data, and flagging where uncertainty is high enough to warrant further investigation.
The Senior Nutrition 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 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.
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 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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 Nutrition Researcher to have:
A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, statistics, economics, public health, nutrition or related fields)
Substantial professional experience relevant to nutrition. We interpret this broadly:
The majority of our work to date has been nutrition programming delivered through the health sector, but we are also interested in other sectors (e.g. agriculture/food systems) that directly affect nutrition outcomes.
Relevant professional experience could include: research roles (e.g. clinical nutrition research; epidemiological or health economics modeling), program roles (e.g. design and implementation, or monitoring and evaluation); funding roles (e.g. grantmaking or impact investing); or other roles in public sector, private sector or non-profit organizations that save and improve lives by addressing malnutrition.
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 nutrition 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: $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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
Summary
GiveWell is seeking a Senior Researcher on our Cross-Cutting team to help us make better funding decisions across our entire portfolio. The Cross-Cutting team works on methodological questions, research quality, and big-picture problems that don't sit naturally inside any single program area.
Cross-Cutting team’s work has included pressure-testing our work through retrospective evaluations of completed grants (
"lookbacks"
) and scrutinizing grantmaking areas (
"red teaming"
), collecting
more on-the-ground quantitative and qualitative information
to check what our grantmaking might be missing, looking for
ways to use AI
to improve our research process, experimenting with new ways to
solicit feedback
, figuring out how to quantify the
“value of information”
in our grantmaking, and answering
thorny research questions
that affect our entire portfolio.
As a Senior Cross-Cutting Researcher, you'll shape ambitious research agendas that cut across GiveWell's portfolios and answer complex questions that inform grantmaking decisions across the organization. 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 team focused on the methodological and cross-portfolio questions that shape how GiveWell does research. You'll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, hone in on those that matter most, and partner with grantmaking teams (Malaria, Water, Nutrition, Vaccines, Livelihoods, New Areas) to pressure-test and extend their work. 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 GiveWell faces across its grantmaking. 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:
Are our grants actually achieving what we predicted? How do we know, and how can we improve our decisions over time?
How do we systematically incorporate field insights, monitoring data, and external feedback into our work?
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 can we use AI tools to speed up or increase the quality of our work?
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?
How should we set our cost-effectiveness bar over time when funding and spending vary unpredictably year to year?
How should we value averting a death versus improving health outcomes versus increasing income? (Our "moral weights" problem)
Where are the systematic risks in our research (i.e., the areas where if we're wrong, we're making big mistakes in how we allocate funding)?
Team structure
Our research department is currently organized into eight teams, including Cross-Cutting:
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 Commons team provides generalized research support to each of the other teams, including landscaping research, vetting, and publishing.
The Cross-Cutting team works closely with other grantmaking teams. Projects typically involve partnering with a team to pressure-test or extend their work, or running methodological projects that set standards across the department.
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 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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 Cross-Cutting Researchers typically 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.
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.
Senior Cross-Cutting Researcher vs. other Senior Researcher roles
We're hiring Senior Researchers for both our Cross-Cutting team and our grantmaking teams. 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 grantmaking-team-specific Senior Researcher roles (e.g., Senior Malaria Researcher or Senior Livelihoods Researcher) may be a better fit.
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.
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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
Summary
GiveWell is seeking a Senior Vaccination Researcher to help us direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective vaccination programs that 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 vaccination grantmaking is focused on increasing coverage of routine immunization in children under the age of two in areas with high burden of vaccine-preventable disease. This has included supporting targeted outreach and mobile vaccination, demand-side incentives, and support for malaria vaccine rollout. In the future, we may expand into new areas such as campaigns, subsidizing vaccine procurement, supply chain support, surveillance and outbreak response, and R&D for vaccines or vaccine delivery technology. Vaccination is one of our fastest-growing areas, from $12 million in 2024 to $50 million in 2025 and more than $70 million expected in 2026.
As a Senior Vaccination 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 vaccination. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and home 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 vaccination 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 GiveWell’s portfolio of investments change in response to new technologies and shifts in government or funder resources and priorities?
What are the most promising opportunities for grant-making in areas such as surveillance and outbreak response and R&D for vaccines or vaccine delivery technology? How should we prioritize those relative to current core areas?
How can we improve our methods for evaluating the impact of programs on vaccination coverage? How can we collect more useful data and combine various sources of information to generate a holistic picture of which programs to expand and which to exit?
What are the core differences between GiveWell's cost-effectiveness model and other vaccine cost-effectiveness models and what learnings from the external models should we apply to our model?
What is the best design for a study to improve available estimates of the impact of key childhood vaccines on disease-specific mortality or all-cause mortality?
The Senior Vaccination 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 seven 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 four people on our vaccination 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 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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 Vaccination Researcher to have
A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, statistics, economics or related fields)
Substantial professional experience in the vaccination 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 vaccination 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: $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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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 whole-org and department retreats 3 times per year 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!
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 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.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
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 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.
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 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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: $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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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!
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 Vaccines 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 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.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
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.
In 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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: $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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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!
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 Vaccines 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 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.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
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 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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: $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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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!
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 Vaccines 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 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.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
Location: United States + International (Remote)
GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.
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.
New Senior Researchers typically begin on our Cross-Cutting team, where they complete a structured onboarding program with one-on-one feedback on core GiveWell skills like evidence review, cost-effectiveness analysis, and clear research writing. Onboarding usually lasts one to two months.
We generally decide which team a new hire will join by the end of onboarding. Most move onto one of our grantmaking teams (for example, malaria, nutrition, vaccines, or New Areas), and some stay on Cross-Cutting. Placement is based mainly on the research team's needs. In most cases, we won't know at the time of the offer which team someone will join, but if a candidate brings specialized expertise, we may settle on a team sooner. Once placed, team members usually stay on that team long-term.
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 2026,
our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
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: $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. 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
Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
Countries we can hire from:
GiveWell is a remote-first organization. However, for the time being, we can only hire within a select number of countries (US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany). To be considered for a role with GiveWell, you need to already be based in one of those countries or be willing to move to one of them. We expect to expand the list of locations where we can hire over the course of 2027, and our job descriptions always reflect the current status — so we'd encourage you to check back and apply again for a role you're eligible for.
Visa sponsorship:
The US is the only country where visa sponsorship is possible for a number of roles, and it's assessed on a case by case basis. For all other countries, you need to already have work authorization, we cannot sponsor visas.
Why we work this way:
Focusing on countries where we already have tested onboarding processes lets us move candidates through hiring faster and with fewer surprises. Every additional country brings its own labor laws, EOR requirements, and new processes to work through, which slows things down for hiring teams and new colleagues alike. Concentrating our footprint keeps the experience consistent and supports GiveWell’s wider absorption capacity goals.
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:
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: 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 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 evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our
giving funds
enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than
340,000 lives
.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of
Top Charities
, which currently support
seasonal malaria chemoprevention
,
insecticide-treated nets
,
vaccine incentivization
, and
vitamin A supplementation
. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to
cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs
.
GiveWell
grants
have:
Helped governments
navigate changes to the funding landscape
and implement high-impact health programs, like
HIV/syphilis screening and treatment
for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the
Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator
to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we
funded a program
to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like
healthcare support and malnutrition treatment
in northern Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support
treatment of clubfoot
and to
evaluate the program
.
Tested our
assumptions and refined our understanding
through further research and data collection, including
improved estimates of disease burden
and studies on
the effect of water chlorination on mortality
and
the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income
.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even
pay people to point out our errors
). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including
funding research
to address our uncertainties and gathering
independent monitoring and evaluation data
about the programs we support. We
change
our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s
recent interview
with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at 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
.
seniorUnited States + International (Remote)
seniorUnited States + International (Remote)
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