Jobs at GiveWell

• Senior Researchers lead ambitious research agendas, answer complex questions, and inform high-impact grantmaking decisions. Applicants must have a quantitatively oriented advanced degree or substantial relevant experience using empirical tools to make real-world decisions.
• GiveWell's Senior Malaria Researcher will be responsible for strengthening the quality of the research and cost-effectiveness modeling guiding GiveWell’s large portfolio of investments in malaria interventions.

We're not currently hiring for any Outreach roles.

Note: The benefits described on this page are current as of September 2024 and will be updated as needed.

• Healthcare. We provide fully funded health, vision, and dental insurance for staff and their families.
• Insurance. We provide life and short- and long-term disability insurance for staff.
• Fertility and family-forming. We offer inclusive fertility, hormonal health, and family-forming benefits through Carrot Fertility.
• Flexible Savings Accounts. We offer FSA benefits to help staff pay for dependent-care services (including daycare, nannies and babysitters, preschool, and elder care) and medical expenses.
• Flexible and remote options. We support and encourage flexible working for most roles, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of staff work flexibly one way or another. We happily employ staff remotely and generally request that employees work within three hours of the Pacific Time Zone.
• Paid time off. We offer 20 days per year of paid time off, in addition to 11 paid holidays and 10 days of paid sick leave. We also provide bereavement leave, time off for unforeseen hardships, and optional unpaid leave. We are always happy to discuss options with staff if more flexibility is required in a given situation.
• Parental leave. For new parents of all types, we offer 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Optional 403(b) plan. GiveWell hosts a 403(b) plan for staff retirement savings. After considering the most equitable way to provide a flexible retirement benefit to all staff, we decided to increase staff salaries rather than providing a matching employer contribution. The salaries we offer already include this increase.
• Professional development. We offer an annual allowance for staff to spend on coaching, courses, workshops, conferences, and other engagements to support professional development goals, and a separate allowance for job-relevant books.
• Wellness stipend. To support staff in their physical and mental health, we offer an annual stipend for expenses such as gym memberships, therapy, meditation retreats, exercise equipment, etc.
• Office equipment and work space. We want all staff to be able to work at maximum effectiveness regardless of where their primary workspace is and to have a workspace that supports their physical well-being. We provide staff with options for ergonomic equipment and work stations and will work with you on setting up an efficient workspace. For remote staff who are interested, we will cover memberships at co-working spaces.
• Office visits for remote staff. To promote social cohesion in an organization with a lot of remote staff, we schedule regular optional visit weeks and cover the cost of travel and lodging for visiting staff.
• Access to Federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness. GiveWell is a qualified employer for the Department of Education's PSLF program, which cancels federal student loans after 10 years of work at eligible public institutions. Please review the PSLF loan and payment criteria to determine your personal eligibility for the program.
  

You can apply through our online application forms, which are linked in our job descriptions. Many roles have an FAQ document linked in the job description that provides information on specific hiring processes and timelines.

Most applications require an initial work exercise in lieu of letters of recommendation or cover letters. If you wish to submit additional files to support your candidacy, you can upload them while completing your application form. However, choosing to not provide a cover letter or letter of recommendation will not impact your application negatively.

During initial screening, the hiring team holistically reviews your application and initial work exercises (if applicable).

We use work exercises to evaluate candidates’ abilities. We hope work exercises will also help you learn more about how we work and communicate.

You may complete one or two work exercises or a longer period of trial work, all of which will be compensated at salary-equivalent rates. GiveWell distributes all compensation as a lump sum at the end of the hiring process.

Please let us know if you require special accommodations to complete any of our application exercises by contacting jobs@givewell.org.

You may be invited to one or more remote interviews with your future manager and other GiveWell staff.

We may ask you to provide several professional references. We arrange short chats with each of the references and use these conversations to understand your background in more detail.

We want you to join the team as soon as possible, but we’re able to work out delayed start dates on a case-by-case basis.

We want to hire the candidates who will perform best in any given role, and it’s often difficult to understand candidates' abilities based solely on interviews and application materials. Work exercises provide us with more data about an applicant’s ability to perform job tasks.

Work exercises also help us identify skilled candidates with non-traditional backgrounds who may not have passed a resume screening process. We’ve used work exercises to hire staff from a wide array of professional backgrounds without an immediate connection to GiveWell’s work, like teaching, journalism, politics, and more.

Our work exercises are centered around essential skills that we believe will determine long term success in a role. These skills can be general (clear communication and attention to detail are important in every role) or specific (reasoning transparency and arriving at a clear bottom line are critical for research roles).

Because we want to develop an accurate and rich understanding of applicants’ job-related skills, we invest significant staff capacity into developing and grading work exercises. We anonymize work exercises when it's reasonable to do so, and we typically grade work exercises with rubrics to ensure consistency. These practices help us avoid some kinds of bias.

Work exercises are especially helpful for roles where the exercise output closely mirrors the day-to-day output for the role. For example, we use trial research projects to evaluate candidates for our research team.

Most likely yes, but check the specifics of the role you’re applying for.

Most of GiveWell’s staff work remotely, and most of our new job openings allow some level of remote work. Each job opening will have specific details on remote work eligibility.

We also think it’s important that remote staff are comfortable and socially connected, and that they have a strong sense of personal well-being. To meet these goals, we:

• Provide high quality home workstations for all remote staff, at no cost.
• Dedicate weekly time for social interaction.
• Hold quarterly, cost-covered Visit Weeks at our Oakland office.
• Offer benefits that may be of particular interest to remote employees, including a wellness stipend and phone/internet subsidies.

No, we don't offer individual feedback on any job applications or work trials at this time. We respect candidates who seek out feedback in an effort to grow, and we wish we were able to provide feedback on a more consistent basis. We also understand that this policy might cause you frustration if you devote substantial time to our hiring process. In an effort to provide a better candidate experience, we occasionally revisit our feedback policy and make small changes. For example, in 2024 we decided to:

• Make a small number of exceptions to this policy for finalist candidates (although we don't commit to providing feedback to every finalist candidate).
• Sometimes include general, non-individual feedback in rejection emails based on qualitative analysis of our applicant pool, a la "The most common reasons people were rejected from this hiring round were X, Y, and Z."

GiveWell has previously sponsored H-1B, TN NAFTA, and E-3 visas, and we’ve successfully sponsored all staff members that have required a visa to work at GiveWell.

Each job description has information on visa sponsorship eligibility. If we make you an offer for a job that's eligible for visa sponsorship, our legal team will work with you on your visa application.

We’re happy to employ international employees on a case-by-case basis! Several of our staff (at a variety of seniority levels across multiple teams) are currently employed outside of the United States.

We’ll expect international candidates to commit to a certain number of working hours that overlap with typical US working hours. For more senior roles, the overlap would be more significant. Each job description shares details on international work eligibility.

GiveWell provides international employees with a location-based compensation and benefits package.

We do not offer any such opportunities at this time, but we’ll post about them on this page if that changes.

Timelines differ by role and by staff capacity. We try to move as quickly as possible, and we'll be happy to share more information about specific timelines if we move forward with your application.

Each position requires a different skillset, but our values point to some traits that we find important throughout our organization. Specifically, we’d like our team members to be invested in our mission of maximizing global well-being, and to be transparent, truth-seeking, and considerate.

More than any particular type of experience, GiveWell is looking for critical, skeptical thinkers with strong communication skills. We have previously hired many team members with unconventional backgrounds.

If you think any of our jobs would make you happy to go to work, please apply!