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.
• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.
• Lean research team = huge personal impact. In 2026, our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly. About you The strongest candidates typically have at least 5-10 years of professional experience, a significant portion of which was in similar or closely-related roles. Many of our senior staff have quantitatively-oriented advanced degrees, but there’s no hard academic requirement — what matters to us is that you’ve used empirical tools to make rigorous, evidence-based decisions under uncertainty, whether you’ve done that in graduate training or hands-on experience. In addition to relevant experience with the responsibilities listed above, we'll be interested in people with strong track records in any of the following areas:
• Funding, building or scaling new programs, initiatives, or organizations.
• Using rigorous quantitative analysis and cost-effectiveness modeling to support decisionmaking
• Building relationships with diverse stakeholders (you'll work with other funders, research organizations, NGOs, and more, so it will be important for you to have strong skill in this area)
• Owning large budgets and/or grant portfolios
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with an emphasis on directness and clarity
• Setting and iterating on strategy in complex, fast moving environments It’s a plus, but not required, if you have experience:
• Engaging with global health, development, or related fields
• Reviewing randomized controlled trials and impact evaluations
• Working with governments or multilateral organizations
• Gathering first-hand data to inform program design
• Managing a variety of grant types, including advocacy and market-shaping initiatives You can review our staff bios here for more practical insight on the backgrounds and experience of our current team. We expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful and happy on our team. This isn’t a full list, but hopefully it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:
• GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally energizing—you like our approach to research and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.
• You’re abnormally curious—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate others’ work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work—you are