Position: Senior Researcher
Salary: Our salaries are competitive with peer organizations like private foundations, academic institutions/think tanks, and the World Bank. We adjust the salaries of remote employees using a tier system. Our pay for this role:
Tier 1 (San Francisco Bay Area or New York City): $209,000.
Tier 2 (all other US locations): $193,100.
International: Custom based on location.
Candidates with exceptional relevant experience may be considered for more senior positions.
Location: You will be joining a hybrid team that works remotely throughout the United States and elsewhere. GiveWell has an office in Oakland, California that you are welcome (not required) to work from. Part of our staff also works from a coworking space in New York City. As a general rule, we request that employees either work in time zones shared by the continental US or, if working outside those time zones, be willing to work hours that are compatible with regular meetings scheduled around California’s timezone. For international staff, this usually means having a 3-hour overlap with a 9am to 5pm Pacific Time schedule. Our priority is for staff members to be able to collaborate relatively easily across different time zones. If you’d like to learn more about how we support remote and international work, please refer to our FAQs page.
Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, regular work-from-home days, part-time work patterns, and periodic remote-work stints. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
Visa sponsorship: We can sponsor work visas. However, please be aware that processing times can be much longer than usual right now and are subject to specific country circumstances. Currently, international remote work is possible.
Timeline: We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis.
The role
Senior Researchers at GiveWell are the intellectual leaders who guide our exploration of how we can do the most good. In this role, you will be responsible for finding, researching, and ultimately recommending high-impact or potentially high-impact giving opportunities. As part of a small team, you will be a significant contributor to our decisions about how hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent with the goal of saving and improving the lives of people living in the lowest-income communities in the world.
You will be a leader on our research team, conducting research to help us identify outstanding programs to recommend. Examples of questions Senior Researchers have worked on recently include:
What is the impact of building footbridges in rural communities?
What should we believe about the impacts of improved water quality on all-cause mortality?
How can we model the general equilibrium effects of cash transfers?
In addition to the core work of identifying outstanding programs, Senior Researchers own messy and complicated questions that inform our analysis, such as:
How can we improve our approach to cost-effectiveness modeling?
How should we use pooled impact estimates from a highly heterogeneous evidence base?
How should we prioritize programs that reduce poverty relative to programs that reduce deaths? What is the moral value of each outcome?
How should we think about the opportunity cost of other actors’ contributions to programs we fund?
Our Senior Researchers leverage a combination of critical research review and synthesis, empirical analysis, modeling, logical reasoning, and good judgment in order to make practical recommendations on a topic.
About you
Senior Researchers typically have a quantitatively oriented advanced degree and/or substantive relevant experience. They also have the intellectual flexibility to tackle a wide range of questions such as those listed above.
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.
Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. Here’s a secret: there’s no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. GiveWell is looking for exceptional people who want to make a positive impact through their work and help create an organization where everyone can thrive. So whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this role would make you excited to come to work every day.
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