Researcher

Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Researchers to help direct hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective global health and poverty alleviation programs. You’ll have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

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

Researchers will have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researcher or Senior Program Officer roles, leading research agendas or owning complex grantmaking portfolios. We’re open to a wide variety of professional development options depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

You’ll join a small grantmaking team to execute ambitious research agendas, sifting through the countless questions we could try to answer and honing in on those that matter most. Your decisions will inform the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to dozens of grantees.

Your practical work will combine empirical evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, and developing your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

• What should we believe about the impacts of improved water quality on all-cause mortality?
• What is the impact of building footbridges in rural communities?
• How can we model the general equilibrium effects of cash transfers?
• How should we prioritize programs that reduce poverty relative to programs that reduce deaths?
• How should we think about the opportunity cost of other actors’ contributions to programs we fund?
• How should we account for high levels of uncertainty in our cost-effectiveness estimates?
• How do we use effects from trials conducted 30 to 40 years ago to predict impacts today?

Responsibilities include:

• Analyzing interventions (e.g., vaccine demand generation, vitamin A supplementation, seasonal malaria chemoprevention) at various levels of depth to refine our view about the cost-effectiveness of a particular intervention and recommend either deprioritization or further work. Researchers review existing empirical evidence about intervention impacts, build models, speak with subject matter experts about particular interventions, and use their judgment to come up with a bottom line. Examples of this work are available on our intervention reports page.
• Building cost-effectiveness models to estimate the costs and benefits of a particular intervention. These models take into account a wide variety of considerations, including: one's prior estimate for an intervention's impact, the strength of the evidence, the size of the effects, the similarity between the context in which an intervention was studied and will be implemented, negative and/or offsetting effects, and how funding this intervention would affect decisions by other actors (e.g., local government, donor governments). See more on our page about our cost-effectiveness models.
• Reviewing specific grantmaking opportunities. We receive and solicit requests for funding on an ongoing basis. Researchers investigate each of these opportunities to determine whether or not they should receive funding. Reviewers discuss each grant opportunity with the applying organization, consider its plans and assess the likelihood it will achieve them, estimate the cost-effectiveness of a grant and forecast its likelihood of success. When necessary, they solicit feedback from outside experts (e.g., academics, government officials) about the opportunity.
• Tackle thorny research questions with creative approaches. We often need to answer questions that don’t have clear answers in published academic journals or other data sources (see some examples above), but which nevertheless matter significantly to our bottom-line funding decisions. You’ll come up with creative approaches to answer these questions, and your work will often influence the funding decisions of many of GiveWell’s research subteams.
• Building relationships with experts relevant to our work, for example, academics who specialize in interventions we are reviewing (e.g., malaria, malnutrition treatment, in-line water chlorination), leaders and program staff at organizations we are considering for funding, and program staff at foundations who are also evaluating where to allocate funds.
• Publishing reports and blog posts on our website. Transparency is a core value of ours and we aim to publish as much supporting information regarding our conclusions as we can. Researchers write up our findings and reasoning for publication on our website or summarize key points from their work in blog posts.

What is career development like?

After gaining experience on the team, Researchers have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researchers, who lead the development of our research agendas. Senior Researchers may then pursue a few pathways for career development based on their preferences and GiveWell’s needs. Some choose to develop wider and more autonomous research agendas as individual contributors, while others take on people management responsibilities. Another potential pathway is to transition into a Program Officer or Senior Program Officer position, in which you’d own a high-impact, cost-effective grantmaking portfolios by deepening your expertise, growing your networks, and understanding the broader context within a specific grantmaking area. Senior Program Officers think through questions like:

• How should we balance exploring and seeding new, smaller opportunities with funding cost-effective opportunities at scale today?
• How can we triangulate empirical evidence against expert opinion on other qualitative features, like organizational track record?
• What is research we can fund today that could substantially impact our grantmaking five years from now?
• How much uncertainty are we willing to accept before making a grant? What key research questions do we need to answer before making a grant, and which ones can we deprioritize or answer later?

Team structure

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

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

In most cases, we hire Researchers without knowing which subteam they’ll eventually sit on. We aim to expose new researchers to different types of work and parts of the team over several months to inform their eventual subteam placement. (We might settle on a subteam more quickly if new hires bring specific, specialized expertise.)

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values. We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.
• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.
• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.
• Lean research team = huge personal impact. Our ~60-person team directs hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.

Details

• Team: You'll join one of our grantmaking teams (see our org structure here) and report to a Senior Researcher or Senior Program Officer.
• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $220,000
• All other U.S. locations: $200,000
• International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency.
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely.
• Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to any of our physical office locations.
• International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. A successful candidate will need to commit to a work schedule that has some overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.
• Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
• Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.
• Benefits: Our benefits include:
• Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
• Four weeks of paid time off per year
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
• Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences (on average 1-2 per year), with additional travel for those interested in traveling more. Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend quarterly whole-org and department retreats to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and we’ll accommodate staff who have conflicting family or other obligations.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date.
• Application deadline: We don't currently have an application deadline. If that changes, we'll update the posting. We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis, so we recommend applying as soon as possible.

About you

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

We expect you will be characterized by many of the below qualities. We encourage you to apply if you would use the majority of these characteristics to describe yourself:

• You are passionate about helping improve global health and alleviate global poverty as much as possible.
• You are highly skilled at critically analyzing and synthesizing empirical research and understanding how a body of evidence may apply to real-world problems.
• You are able to plan an efficient approach to exploring complicated questions, including identifying and focusing on the most decision-relevant aspects of a project.
• You consider the big picture, asking questions like: is this project appropriately formulated and the best use of my time? What is GiveWell getting wrong in our research?
• You clearly communicate what you believe and why, as well as what you are uncertain about.
• You ask a lot of questions, and are curious, rather than defensive, when interrogating your own or others’ work.
• You are able to execute research that holds up under scrutiny from others and over time.
• You are respectful, effective, and efficient in your interactions with colleagues as well as external parties.

Other notes

• Please note that our hiring process consists of the same work trials for the following roles: 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.
• Please note that this role was previously titled "Senior Research Associate." The position itself remains unchanged.
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise, two compensated work trials, and several short interviews. You can see more details about our hiring process on our FAQs page!
• You don't need to submit a cover letter with your application—we only want your resume/CV and answers to the application questions below.
• We don’t offer informational calls at this stage, but please email us at [email protected] with any questions not answered here!

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