Program Officer

Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Program Officers 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 own grant investigations and help manage a portfolio of grants, evaluating the best funding opportunities and helping shape new ones. You will answer hard questions and make funding recommendations by combining rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, grantee relationships, and thoughtful judgment.

The role

You'll join a small grantmaking team to own grant investigations and help manage a portfolio of grants, sifting through the many opportunities we could fund and honing in on those that matter most—and, when the best opportunity doesn't yet exist, helping bring a better one into being. 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, grantee engagement, ground-truthing of how programs are delivered, discussions with subject matter experts, and developing your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

• Should we make this grant, and how should we structure it (e.g., conditions, milestones, or gates)?
• When a promising intervention has no clear implementer, what would it take to help one get off the ground?
• Is this grant on track, and if not, why?
• Do a grantee's reported outputs reflect real coverage, quality, and adherence to evidence-based practices on the ground?
• What should we believe about the cost-effectiveness of an intervention in our portfolio, and what would change our minds?
• How should we monitor a grant's progress, and what would tell us to course-correct?
• How should we account for high levels of uncertainty in our cost-effectiveness estimates?
• How should we weigh empirical evidence against qualitative factors, like a grantee's organizational track record?

Responsibilities include:

• Investigating and recommending grants. We receive and solicit requests for funding on an ongoing basis, and you'll own investigations into these opportunities from scoping through recommendation. You'll discuss each opportunity with the potential grantee, consider its plans and assess the likelihood of achieving them, estimate the cost-effectiveness of the grant and forecast its likelihood of success, and recommend how to structure it (e.g., whether to include conditions, milestones, or gates). When necessary, you'll solicit feedback from outside experts (e.g., academics, government officials) about the opportunity.
• Managing a portfolio of grants. Once a grant is made, you'll maintain a current view of whether it's on track and why. This includes collaborating with grantees to assess whether reported outputs reflect real coverage, quality, and adherence to evidence-based practices, and ground-truthing how programs are delivered—through monitoring data, site visits, and conversations with field staff—so we can learn and course-correct over the life of the grant.
• 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 interventions in your portfolio and recommend either deprioritization or further work. You'll review existing empirical evidence about intervention impacts, build models, speak with subject matter experts about particular interventions, and use your 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.
• Building relationships relevant to our work, for example with grantees and program staff at organizations we are funding or considering for funding, academics who specialize in interventions we are reviewing (e.g., malaria, malnutrition treatment, in-line water chlorination), and program staff at other funders 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. Program Officers write up 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, Program Officers have the opportunity to develop into Senior Program Officers, who own high-impact, cost-effective grantmaking portfolios by deepening their expertise, growing their networks, and understanding the broader context within a specific grantmaking area. Senior Program Officers may then pursue a few pathways for career development based on their preferences and GiveWell's needs. Some choose to deepen and expand their portfolios as individual contributors, while others take on people management responsibilities. Another potential pathway is to move into the research track as a Researcher, focusing on leading research agendas rather than owning a grantmaking portfolio.

Team structure

Our research department is currently organized into eight teams:

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

In some cases, we’ll make offers for specific subteam placements. In others, we’ll offer the opportunity to complete a few rotations on different teams over several months before settling on a final subteam placement. We’ll discuss placement details in the final stages of the hiring process.

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values. We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.

• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.

• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.

• Lean research team = huge personal impact. Our ~70-person research 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.

The 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 annual department retreats and twice-annual whole org visit weeks to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and we’ll accommodate staff who have conflicting obligations.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date.
• Application deadline: We don't currently have an application deadline. If that changes, we'll update the posting. We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis, so we recommend applying as soon as possible.

About you

The strongest candidates will typically have around 3-5 years of professional experience, a significant portion of which was in similar or closely-related roles. Many of our Program Officers have quantitatively-oriented advanced degrees, but there's no hard academic requirement—what matters is a demonstrated ability to use empirical tools to make rigorous, evidence-based decisions, whether that comes from graduate training or hands-on experience.

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 applies to real-world funding decisions.
• You get things done, and you'll drop what you're doing when something matters more. You drive work to conclusions, and when the evidence shifts or a higher-value opportunity appears, you're eager to pivot.
• You're drawn to gaps. When you see something missing—a program that should exist, an implementer worth seeding, a better way to structure a grant—you want to help make it happen, and you're comfortable taking bets under uncertainty.
• 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 effective at building and managing relationships with external parties, including grantees, experts, and other funders.
• You are respectful, effective, and efficient in your interactions with colleagues as well as external parties.

Other notes

• Please note that our hiring process relies on some (not all) of the same work trials that we use in our Researcher and Senior Researcher roles (including team-specific Senior Researcher postings). If you applied to one of these roles within the last year, you should hold off on applying to others unless our team reaches out directly. If you're interested in multiple roles, please just apply once and note in your application that you'd like to be considered for the other roles, too.
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise, 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!