Senior Program Officer

GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.

The role

Senior Program Officers are the leaders of GiveWell's grantmaking. In this role, you'll take primary responsibility for a significant grantmaking portfolio, setting its strategy and sifting through the many opportunities we could fund to focus on those that matter most. Your decisions will inform the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to dozens of grantees. You'll also communicate externally about our work and mentor and advise other members of the team.

You will build and lead a grantmaking portfolio that brings rigor and creativity to GiveWell's hardest funding problems. You'll combine rigorous review of empirical evidence, cost-effectiveness modeling, strong grantee relationships, ground-truthing of how programs are actually delivered, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment to decide what to fund, how to structure it, and when to build something new. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

How should we balance exploring and seeding new, smaller opportunities with funding cost-effective opportunities at scale today?

When the best opportunity doesn't exist yet, how do we create it, whether through co-design, seeding an implementer, or shaping broader incentives?

What is the best direction for our portfolio, and are we correctly prioritizing the programs and grantees we fund?

Where are the highest-impact opportunities to expand the portfolio while improving its cost-effectiveness?

How can we triangulate empirical evidence against expert opinion and other qualitative features, like a grantee's organizational track record?

Do a grantee's reported outputs reflect real coverage, quality, and adherence to evidence-based practices on the ground?

What research can we fund today that could substantially improve our grantmaking five years from now?

How much uncertainty are we willing to accept before making a grant, and which questions do we need to answer first?

Senior Program Officers work closely with Senior Researchers , an equivalently-leveled, parallel role on our team. Senior Researchers typically set the research agenda for grantmaking areas and tackle the thorniest, most open-ended questions we face, while Senior Program Officers own the grant and portfolio decisions — deciding what we fund and why, and incorporating Senior Researchers' analysis into their decisionmaking. Senior Program Officers have a research mindset, too: they're comfortable digging into a cost-effectiveness model and forming their own view of the evidence.

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.