Senior Philanthropy Advisor

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

GiveWell is hiring a Senior Philanthropy Advisor to manage and advise a portfolio of our largest donors. This role will help shape our relationship strategy with donors giving seven- to ten-figure gifts and will have significant influence over how GiveWell’s philanthropy function grows and evolves. You will manage and advise a portfolio of our largest donors, serve as a leader within our philanthropy team, and be a thought partner to our senior leadership team.

Why We’re Hiring Now Many of our donors are analytical, quantitative thinkers, and their deep engagement with our research makes our work better. We've built a philanthropy team to match. We take the time to understand what our donors value, we treat their giving as a true partnership, and we invest in learning our own research deeply so we can help donors do the same. We measure our relationships in years, not quarters.

We face a historic opportunity to scale giving to high-impact causes and to save and improve lives around the world. To meet this moment, we are engaging a new generation of major philanthropists, while strengthening the partnerships model that has made our existing donor relationships so productive. We believe that deepening our philanthropic partnerships with our current and future major donors is one of the highest-leverage actions GiveWell can take to ensure significantly more funding for some of the world’s most cost-effective programs.

What You’ll Do

Build long-term, trust-based relationships with major donors that deepen donors’ understanding of GiveWell’s work.

Proactively identify the insights, data points, and narratives from GiveWell’s research that are most relevant to major donor decision-making.

Drive and lead team-wide initiatives and significant projects to make our work accessible, from learning journey design, playbooks, and systems to donor events and donor communications.

Translate GiveWell’s research into original donor-facing content that makes our work accessible to analytically sophisticated, time-poor major donors.

Serve as a strategic advisor to GiveWell’s leadership.

Drive improvements to our philanthropy culture, systems, and processes to improve how our philanthropy function operates and scales.

About You

You understand how people translate their values into action. You're comfortable connecting with a wide range of people, from the donor who wants to deeply understand every assumption in our model to the donor who wants a high-trust, low-friction recommendation they can act on quickly, and everyone in between.

Your background includes significant experience earning trust with discerning, analytic people, where you are a partner in somebody else's high-stakes decisions. You've experienced navigating this, not by telling them what to do, but by helping them think clearly and get the right information to support what they're trying to accomplish. You know how to help people navigate doubt and complexity. You are comfortable both bringing a clear point of view (for example, by saying, "Here's what I would do") and helping people strengthen their own judgment over time.

You are excited by intellectually demanding work. You are ready to engage with complex global health topics, including our cost-effectiveness models, program evaluation, and evidence quality. You are driven to get up to speed and be ready to explain them clearly to audiences who will push back on our thinking. You are excited to engage with hard follow-up questions and people who will expect rigorous answers. While you don't need prior global health experience, you will need to demonstrate you can get up to speed quickly on complex quantitative subject matter and translate it rigorously and credibly.

You bring high emotional intelligence, curiosity, and a clear sense of mission to your day-to-day work. You’re a collaborator who connects dots and builds relationships across teams.

You bring depth of leadership experience, and you are comfortable supporting strategic decisions and rolling up your sleeves to build and shape our work. You are ready to bring adaptive energy to this work while being comfortable deeply explaining your reasoning and taking time to reach high-quality decisions where it matters.

Strong candidates will have:

A track record of managing sophisticated, high-stakes relationships—whether with major donors, ultra-high-net-worth clients, foundation officers, board members, or similarly discerning stakeholders in another field entirely.

Exceptional relationship management skills, with high emotional intelligence, an advisory mindset, and the ability to hold a large amount of context about a person and synthesize it in real time.

Interest in global health and development, and the ability to engage in complex research and ideas even without prior experience in the sector.

Excellent communication skills, written and verbal—clear, tailored, and credible messaging for discerning stakeholders, including comfort producing original written content.

Leadership skills to partner with senior staff and influence across teams collaboratively.