Director of Strategic Initiatives

This is a private, closed hiring round. Please do not share this link with others, and please do not apply unless you've received a Google Doc job posting from a member of GiveWell's team.

About GiveWell

GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify. 

GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than 340,000 lives.

GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, insecticide-treated nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.

GiveWell grants have:

• Helped governments navigate changes to the funding landscape and implement high-impact health programs, like HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
• Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we funded a program to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
• Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like healthcare support and malnutrition treatment in northern Cameroon.
• Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.  
• Tested our assumptions and refined our understanding through further research and data collection, including improved estimates of disease burden and studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality and the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income.

We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research to address our uncertainties and gathering independent monitoring and evaluation data about the programs we support. We change our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.

Additional information

We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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