GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025.
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. Our research team of just over 60 people directs hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
- We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.
About you
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: $241,000.
- All other U.S. locations: $219,000.
- 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
- 403(b) retirement plan
- Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely. 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.
- 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.
- Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
- Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.
- Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences (on average 1-2 per year), with additional travel for those interested in traveling more. Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend 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: Senior Researcher, Researcher, and any of our specialized Senior Researcher roles. 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 funding outstanding giving opportunities in global health and development, sharing the full details of our analysis with everyone for free. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.6 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we’ve directed will save more than 340,000 lives.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.
GiveWell grants have:
We never take for granted that GiveWell’s work is good for the world. We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research and external analysis to address our uncertainties and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell’s Privacy Statement for Applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell’s Work Trial Policy.
