Cause Prioritization Lead

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.
• 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.
• The New Areas team focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell.

The New Areas team is currently a 9-person team within an overall research department of ~80 people, and focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell. Our work is divided into three main workstreams. Grantmaking in emerging cause areas, as well as the process for and identification of new cause areas for that portfolio, would be the primary responsibility of the Cause Prioritization Lead.

• Core cause areas: this is the set of cause areas for which the New Areas team devotes a significant amount of time developing subject-matter specific expertise and networks, a thorough research agenda, and a relatively large portfolio of grants across a mix of implementers and interventions. This portfolio currently includes our work on maternal and newborn health, family planning, tuberculosis, HIV and medical oxygen.
• Emerging cause areas: this is a broader set of cause areas for which the New Areas team is starting to build its expertise, networks and research agenda, and is making some initial grants. As our work in these areas becomes more mature, they could graduate to become a core cause area. In addition to new cause areas, this portfolio may include work on types of intervention that are new to GiveWell which could have applications across our teams: recent examples include market shaping, health systems strengthening and applications of AI to global health.
• Incubators: we support other organisations to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future (e.g., the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator). For example, we funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program. Some of this work could fall under the remit of the Cause Prioritization Lead where it overlaps with our emerging cause areas.

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply 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 Cause Prioritization lead must have quantitatively-oriented advanced degrees and substantial relevant experience using empirical tools to make rigorous, evidence-based decisions in the real world. Practically, our senior research staff typically has 5-10 years of post-grad work experience prior to joining GiveWell. We're happy to consider applicants who do not have advanced degrees, but we'll look for a commensurate amount of relevant experience. 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 unusually curious—you ask lots of questions, and you're willing to interrogate others' work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work, and you aren’t defensive when your research comes under scrutiny.
• You're a generalist and agile —you are able to get up to speed quickly on new topics and you feel comfortable task-switching. You are comfortable pivoting your focus as we learn new information, and are continuously reassessing promisingness.
• You're a strong strategic thinker. You find ways to impose structure on a broad and undefined problem (e.g., how should your team prioritise work across a huge range of potential cause areas), you can develop and articulate a vision to your team, and build processes to execute that vision.
• You're excited by people management. You take other team members' professional development seriously, and can provide a supportive environment whilst also delivering constructive feedback.
• You're able to quickly hone in on the crux of the argument when assessing other people's work, probing on the most decision-relevant assumptions even in fields where you have limited contextual knowledge.
• You're entrepreneurial. When you see a gap, you want to fill it, whether that's designing a new program, finding an implementer, or setting up a new kind of funding mechanism. You make bets under uncertainty.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that underlie your work. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours and your team’s.
• You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don’t seem to rely on commensurate evidence. You carefully and legibly communicate about your confidence levels.
• You appreciate the value of an excellent reputation and strong relationships. You can moderate your directness and intensity when you’re communicating with external folks.
• You love a gnarly problem. You figure out the most important questions to answer, go deep on the details where they matter (and move on where they don’t), and reassess your mental models based on what you’ve learned.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $308,000.
• All other U.S. locations: $280,000
• International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency.
• Benefits: Our benefits include:
• Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
• Four weeks of paid time off per year
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely.
• Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to any of our physical office locations.
• International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. A successful candidate will need to commit to a work schedule that has some overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.
• 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.
• Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.
• Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences (on average 1-2 per year), with additional travel for those interested in traveling more. Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend annual department retreats and twice-annual whole org visit weeks to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and we’ll accommodate staff who have conflicting obligations.

Miscellaneous details:

• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of compensated work trials and interviews. You can see more details about our hiring process on our FAQs page!
• We devote significant staff capacity to initial application review, and we respond to all applications as quickly as possible.
• The application deadline for this role is September 30th.
• You don't need to submit a cover letter—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.