Cause Prioritization Lead

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.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking a Cause Prioritization Lead to own and improve our cause prioritization process, develop a portfolio of early-stage grants across emerging cause areas, and rapidly respond to promising new opportunities that are unusual for GiveWell, do not fit with our existing grantmaking teams and may require innovative approaches to investigation.

As part of our lean research team, you will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale. You’ll create and lead ambitious research agendas, answer complex questions, and inform high-impact grantmaking decisions by combining rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

The Cause Prioritization lead will join GiveWell at Senior Program Officer level. You will build a sub-team within the New Areas team and will report to our New Areas team lead.

The role

As Cause Prioritization Lead, you will be an intellectual leader of GiveWell’s work in new domains. In this role, you will build and lead a new sub-team within GiveWell's New Areas team. You will be responsible for:

Improving our cause prioritization process to identify promising emerging areas for grantmaking; ensuring that process combines evidence, cost-effectiveness modelling and our own judgement, and is continuously responsive to new information and external feedback.

Overseeing a portfolio of grant investigations and grant management in each of the highest priority emerging cause areas, and starting to build a research agenda including identifying ways to learn about key uncertainties through the initial grants that we make.

Communicating externally about our work and building a network of people across implementers, funders, and academia whose expertise span a broad range of cause areas, to help source new ideas.

Managing a team to execute these goals, and supporting the professional development of other team members. Creating a culture that is agile and willing to respond to new and unusual opportunities.

Directly investigating more complicated grantmaking opportunities yourself. This could include investigating types of programs that are newer to GiveWell; for example, programs earlier in the product development cycle or programs to support government prioritization and planning.

In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

How can we source new grantmaking opportunities in fields in which we don't have an established presence, and how can we make sure we hear from a range of implementers, not just those we've worked with before?

How much uncertainty are we willing to accept before making a grant, which questions do we need to answer before making a grant, and which ones can we deprioritize or answer later?

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

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

How can we ensure that we identify new funding gaps opened up by changes in other donors' priorities?

How can we triangulate empirical evidence against expert opinion on other qualitative features, like organizational track record?

How can we estimate the probability that a new health commodity comes to market in low and middle income countries, and on what timeline, at what scale?

How can we model the cost-effectiveness of a horizontal program which has benefits across a diffuse set of health outcomes?

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.