Research Analyst

Position description

As a Research Analyst on GiveWell’s Commons team, you will support our broader research team in identifying cost-effective giving opportunities. Your work will contribute to GiveWell’s decisions about how hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent to save and improve the lives of people living in the lowest-income communities in the world. You will also play a key role in fulfilling our commitment to transparency and ensuring that the work we produce is accurate and high quality.

You will contribute to our work in a variety of ways, including:

• Writing public summaries of the reasoning behind our grant decisions
• Quality checking pages we publish about our work and spreadsheets that we rely on to inform our decision making
• Answering defined research questions via desk research (for example, “What options does a maize farmer in Malawi have for selling their product?” or “How does the U.S. Congress make decisions about how to appropriate funding for global health programs?”)
• Summarizing results from the monitoring and evaluation reports that grantees send us
• Updating our cost-effectiveness analyses to reflect new information or analysis performed by other research staff
• Providing occasional project management support (more detail below)

Team structure

Our research team is organized into subteams that each focus on a specific area of our grantmaking (malaria, water quality, vaccines, etc.). The Commons team is external to these subteams; we provide shared and flexible research capacity so we can direct our effort toward the highest priority areas at a given time. As a Research Analyst on the Commons team, you will have opportunities to learn about and contribute to investigations across research subteams, giving you a breadth of knowledge about GiveWell’s work.

You may also have opportunities to temporarily embed in a subteam for the duration of a grant investigation or other project. During these periods, in addition to the research work noted above, you may be asked to help with the project management of research investigations, which can include tasks like maintaining our information management systems, keeping track of progress and checking in with relevant stakeholders as needed, scheduling and taking notes during calls with external contacts, and generally driving our investigations forward.

In some cases, we expect that Research Analysts who are excelling in their role will be embedded permanently in a research subteam.

Role details and benefits

Salary: Our salaries are competitive with peer organizations like private foundations, academic institutions/think tanks, and the World Bank. We adjust the salaries of remote employees using a tier system. Our pay for this role:

• Tier 1 (San Francisco Bay Area or New York City): $105,800. This includes a base salary of $92,000 and an additional $13,800 (15% of salary) in cash in lieu of a separate retirement benefit.
• Tier 2 (all other US locations): $95,900. This includes a base salary of $83,400 and an additional $12,500 (15% of salary) in cash in lieu of a separate retirement benefit.
• International: Custom based on location.

Location: GiveWell staff primarily work remotely within the U.S. GiveWell has offices in Oakland, California, and Brooklyn, New York City, which you are welcome but not required to work from. We may employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. We require that employees either work in time zones shared by the continental U.S. or, if working outside those time zones, be willing to work hours that are compatible with regular meetings scheduled around U.S. time zones.

Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.

Benefits: Our benefits include:

• Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the U.S. for you and any dependents)
• Four weeks of paid time off per year
• Four months of fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan

You can see our full list of benefits here.

Visa sponsorship: We will attempt to sponsor work visas for hired staff members who wish to move to the U.S. However, please be aware that we are unable to control visa eligibility or processing times and cannot guarantee visa approval.

Timeline: We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

About you

We expect you will be characterized by most of the qualities listed below.

• Strong communicator: You write clearly and concisely. You are able to interface respectfully, effectively, and efficiently with people in all program areas at GiveWell and externally. You clearly communicate what you believe and why, as well as what you are uncertain about. You check in proactively when you’re unsure about something or when you notice a potential problem. You are able to translate clear, detailed write-ups about complex topics into clear and succinct public summaries.
• Analytical: You are able to make judgment calls about how to interpret and use messy data and explain your reasoning for your choices. You are sufficiently comfortable with quantitative reasoning to summarize main points and identify key details within technical content.
• Conscientious: You have meticulous attention to detail. You are highly productive and keep your work organized. You are able to carefully follow a process with many steps. You are thoughtful about how you approach your work, keeping the big picture in mind and, when appropriate, asking questions about why we do things the way we do. You perform high-quality work, with or without supervision. You are receptive to feedback. You learn from your mistakes and rarely repeat them.
• Mission-motivated: You are passionate about maximizing global well-being. GiveWell is focused on programs that aim to save lives and improve human well-being in low- and middle-income countries. You want to contribute to GiveWell’s mission and are passionate about accomplishing as much as possible with the resources available.
• Curious and versatile: You are excited to learn about a wide cross-section of our grantmaking and to work with a variety of people.

The ideal candidate for this position will possess most of the skills described above and will have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. However, there is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. If you are on the fence about applying because you are unsure whether you are qualified, we would strongly encourage you to apply.

About GiveWell

GiveWell is motivated by the simple question: How can we do as much good as possible?

Our staff researches and makes grants to support the most cost-effective global health programs that save and improve lives. We focus on global health and poverty alleviation in the lowest-income parts of the world because that is where we’ve found we can have the greatest impact.

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In 2022, we directed over $400 million. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we’ve directed will save more than 200,000 lives.

Recent grants have supported programs that:

• Are evidence-backed, cost-effective, transparent, and in need of more funding. Many of our largest grants have supported malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, vitamin A supplementation, and deworming medication.
• Seek to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator and Evidence Action’s Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we recently funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
• Test our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.

Application instructions

Please be sure to indicate you saw this position on tendersglobal.net