Program Officer - Livelihoods

GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from raising $1.5 million annually in 2010 to raising ~$350 million in 2024.

We're hiring a Program Officer to establish and drive GiveWell's livelihoods grantmaking portfolio. This work will evaluate and recommend cost-effective programs that have the main aim of increasing income and consumption for people in extreme poverty—expanding on our longstanding focus of averting death and disease. The livelihoods portfolio is new at GiveWell, which presents a unique opportunity for the right candidate to lead the development of a grantmaking portfolio. You'll be a senior leader on our team, setting its inaugural strategy and making recommendations that will shape its size and direction. If you find there is substantial cost-effective grantmaking potential, you may have the chance to grow the team and scale up the impact of our livelihoods investments. This is an exciting opportunity to help shape GiveWell’s thinking and funding in a space that is both underexplored and potentially high-impact.

The Role

As the Livelihoods Program Officer, you will: 

Establish and develop GiveWell's livelihoods portfolio strategy and execution:

• Develop a strategic vision for GiveWell's positioning in global livelihoods work. This will consist of formulating and testing hypotheses on the most promising investment areas in livelihoods. In time, we envision you becoming a leader who can help shape the global agenda in this space.
• Build GiveWell's portfolio of livelihoods grants from the ground up. This will include:
• Identifying investment areas which are (or have the potential to be) highly cost effective and can absorb substantial funding
• Carrying out evidence review and building cost-effectiveness models for these areas 
• Investigating and recommending grant opportunities, including piloting new programs and conducting impact evaluations where appropriate
• Developing methodologies for evaluating our grants' effectiveness both before and after a grant is made
• Establishing high standards for the quality and rigor of our grant investigations and learning agendas across the portfolio

Lead GiveWell’s external engagement and build relationships in the livelihoods space:

• Build a strong network of expert advisors in the global development and livelihoods space
• Represent GiveWell at conferences and external events
• Communicate effectively with select donors about our livelihoods work
• Develop strong relationships with implementing partners and grantees
• Proactively engage with other funders in the space to (a) better understand how we can fill gaps and (b) share our research to support others’ decision making

Contribute to GiveWell's broader research and organizational goals:

• Uphold GiveWell’s core values: maximizing global well-being, truth-seeking, transparency, and considerateness 
• Provide input on team structure, capacity needs, and research priorities
• Participate in recruiting and hiring efforts
• Identify improvements to research methodologies and grantmaking processes
• Invest in the professional development of junior members of our research team

Potentially establish and manage a small team conducting world-class research:

• Make a recommendation as to whether and how GiveWell should further staff the livelihoods team
• If we decide to create a small team, strategically prioritize team capacity to drive the highest-impact grantmaking opportunities

About You

The strongest candidates will have 10+ years of professional experience, a significant portion of which was used in similar or closely-related roles. In addition to relevant experience with the responsibilities listed above, we’ll be looking for someone with a strong track record of:

• Rigorous analysis and critical thinking 
• Creating and using quantitative analysis and cost-effectiveness modeling 
• Strategic thinking and track record of self-directed execution (You'll be developing our portfolio strategy from scratch, so we need someone who takes ownership and drives results without close supervision.)
• Getting things done in environments with competing priorities and multiple workstreams
• Building relationships with diverse stakeholders 
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with an emphasis on directness and clarity

Preferentially but not by requirement, we’d like to find someone with experience:

• Engaging with livelihoods-focused programs and global development work
• Reviewing randomized controlled trials and impact evaluations, particularly those measuring consumption in low-income countries
• Engaging with development economics literature and current debates in the field
• Overseeing large budgets and/or grant portfolios

We also expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful on our team. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but we hope it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:

• GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally motivating and energizing.
• You’re curious and a team player—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate your own and others’ work.  You provide feedback in a considerate and constructive way, and are open to changing your mind as a result of others' input.
• You routinely think about and surface the assumptions that underpin your conclusions. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours.
• You especially appreciate it when people explicitly and clearly communicate about their confidence levels, and when their level of confidence is commensurate with the strength of the available evidence.
• 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 starting points based on what you’ve learned.

Details

• Team: You'll report to a Senior Program Officer
• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $226,800
• All other U.S. locations: $205,600
• International: Custom based on location. We can give you a specific number on request..
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad.
• Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK.
• International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. Given the managerial nature of this role, a successful candidate will need to work hours that have a certain minimum 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.
• 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
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences; on average 1-2 per year, with additional travel (including internationally) for those interested in traveling more. 
• Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend quarterly whole-org and department retreats to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. As team leads, Program Officers are expected to attend the large majority of these. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and plan to work with staff who have family or other obligations.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.

Key Questions

Why is GiveWell expanding its livelihoods grantmaking?

To date, GiveWell has directed more funding to health than to livelihoods programs. One reason for that is that our current moral weights framework places especially high value on averting death and disease relative to increasing income and consumption.

However, we recognize that people hold different views on what outcomes are most important, and we take seriously alternative moral frameworks that place greater value on increasing income and consumption than our health-focused approach has to date. We’re creating this role because we’re open to putting a significant amount of funding toward the most cost-effective livelihoods interventions that we can find, as part of our ongoing effort to reflect the range of values held by our donors and program participants. (See this 2016 article for more discussion of ‘worldview diversification’ from GiveWell’s cofounder.)

So far, we’ve made some targeted investments in promising livelihoods opportunities, including grants to Malengo's educational migration program, research on GiveDirectly's cash transfer spillover effects, and a long-term follow-up study of Raising the Village's poverty alleviation program in Uganda. We think there are likely highly cost-effective livelihoods opportunities that we don’t yet know about or haven't fully explored. We’re excited for you to uncover them, and build upon our past work to help shape our approach to livelihoods going forward.

Why should you consider applying?

You'll have the opportunity to achieve significant personal impact on the lives and wellbeing of people around the world by establishing a new portfolio and potentially influencing the global livelihoods agenda.

GiveWell is at a unique moment in its history—we're currently focusing on strengthening our approach to grantmaking, including:

• Improving our networks with experts and decision-makers
• Exploring grant categories that are underexplored by GiveWell, including advocacy and market-shaping initiatives
• Supporting different kinds of data collection, both quantitative and qualitative, to better inform program design

You'd help shape our evolution, influencing both the new livelihoods portfolio and GiveWell's broader decision-making.

You'll also have a large degree of autonomy. GiveWell has clearly-defined funding criteria, but as a senior leader on our team you'll have substantial freedom in deciding how to operationalize them.

Additionally, you may enjoy working on our research team, which is filled with people who prize intellectual rigor and care deeply about the world and each other.

What distinguishes GiveWell’s approach?

• Our research team is entirely independent, partially because we rely on the support of many individual donors and partially because we prohibit single donors from funding a disproportionate amount of our operational expenses (more here). That means our team sets its own strategy and research agenda.
• We focus on cost-effectiveness rather than other strategic frameworks (e.g. SDGs or community-led development). You can read about the moral weights that inform our views on cost-effectiveness here.
• Transparency is one of our core values, and we take it very seriously. Publicly, we post our mistakes and virtually all of our research work. Internally, we have high standards for transparency, from writing style (we think reasoning transparency is very important) to collecting internal feedback (most internal documents are open for team comment at any time).

We encourage you to check out examples of our research in the “About GiveWell” section below to get a feel for the rigor we bring to our work.

What are some of the reasons I might not like this role?

This role may not be the right fit if:

• You don’t find GiveWell’s mission appealing; for example, you don’t think that cost-effectiveness is a helpful criterion to decide how to allocate funding. 
• You dislike multitasking and people-facing work, and prefer to focus on one project at the time (If that’s the case, we encourage you to review our Senior Researcher job description).
• You feel uncomfortable with making choices in situations of high uncertainty.
• You would dislike not having a fixed budget allocation for your grantmaking area. GiveWell tries to allocate funds to the most cost effective giving opportunities we’re aware of. Because of this, we don’t allocate set amounts of money to specific portfolios, but make grants on a case-by-case basis.
• You prefer to manage an established portfolio rather than building one from the ground up.

What is the hiring process like?

The steps in the hiring process are described below. Please note that we could choose not to move forward at any stage after application review. We plan to devote significant staff effort to application review, and we’ll respond to everyone who applies. After step 2, you’ll be in contact with a recruiter who will quickly answer any practical questions about the process or timelines.

1. Application.
2. 45-minute skills test.
3. 5-hour work trial, compensated at a salary-equivalent rate. You’ll meet with a member of our research team before completing this trial, and you’ll also have the option to complete an additional non-evaluative informational call with a recruiter.
4. Final work trial, compensated at a salary-equivalent rate.
5. Late-stage interviews with senior members of our research team.
6. Reference checks.
7. Offer.