Senior Research Associate (job market)

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 thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We've grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing $400 million in 2024.

Summary GiveWell is seeking exceptional Senior Research Associates 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.

Senior Research Associates will have the opportunity to develop into Senior Researcher or 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.

This job listing is currently only open to economics PhD students on the job market. If you're curious about how this job might look different from other opportunities you're considering on the job market, check out this short doc written by Alex Cohen (Principal Researcher; cross-cutting team lead).

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:

• 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, Senior Research Associates 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 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. 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 over 50 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 Senior Research Associates 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 research team of just over 50 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 You should be graduating with a doctoral degree in a quantitative field like economics, mathematics, or statistics. The practical work of this role is probably most aligned with the applied microeconomics subfield (think development, health, labor, or similar), but we also have successful team members from theoretical and behavioral econ backgrounds, and we're open to applicants from all subfields.

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 . click apply for full job details