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.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking exceptional Program Officers to help us direct hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective global health and poverty alleviation programs. 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 own grant investigations and help manage a portfolio of grants, evaluating the best funding opportunities and helping shape new ones. You will answer hard questions and make funding recommendations by combining rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, grantee relationships, and thoughtful judgment.

Update: We'll close this posting on September 11, 2026.

The role

You'll join a small grantmaking team to own grant investigations and help manage a portfolio of grants, sifting through the many opportunities we could fund and honing in on those that matter most—and, when the best opportunity doesn't yet exist, helping bring a better one into being. Your decisions will inform the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to dozens of grantees.

Your practical work will combine empirical evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, grantee engagement, ground-truthing of how programs are delivered, discussions with subject matter experts, and developing your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

Should we make this grant, and how should we structure it (e.g., conditions, milestones, or gates)?

When a promising intervention has no clear implementer, what would it take to help one get off the ground?

Is this grant on track, and if not, why?

Do a grantee's reported outputs reflect real coverage, quality, and adherence to evidence-based practices on the ground?

What should we believe about the cost-effectiveness of an intervention in our portfolio, and what would change our minds?

How should we monitor a grant's progress, and what would tell us to course-correct?

How should we account for high levels of uncertainty in our cost-effectiveness estimates?

How should we weigh empirical evidence against qualitative factors, like a grantee's organizational track record?

Responsibilities include:

Investigating and recommending grants. We receive and solicit requests for funding on an ongoing basis, and you'll own investigations into these opportunities from scoping through recommendation. You'll discuss each opportunity with the potential grantee, consider its plans and assess the likelihood of achieving them, estimate the cost-effectiveness of the grant and forecast its likelihood of success, and recommend how to structure it (e.g., whether to include conditions, milestones, or gates). When necessary, you'll solicit feedback from outside experts (e.g., academics, government officials) about the opportunity.

Managing a portfolio of grants. Once a grant is made, you'll maintain a current view of whether it's on track and why. This includes collaborating with grantees to assess whether reported outputs reflect real coverage, quality, and adherence to evidence-based practices, and ground-truthing how programs are delivered—through monitoring data, site visits, and conversations with field staff—so we can learn and course-correct over the life of the grant.

Analyzing interventions (e.g., vaccine demand generation, vitamin A supplementation, seasonal malaria chemoprevention) at various levels of depth to refine our view about the cost-effectiveness of interventions in your portfolio and recommend either deprioritization or further work. You'll review existing empirical evidence about intervention impacts, build models, speak with subject matter experts about particular interventions, and use your judgment to come up with a bottom line. Examples of this work are available on our intervention reports page .

Building cost-effectiveness models to estimate the costs and benefits of a particular intervention. These models take into account a wide variety of considerations, including: one's prior estimate for an intervention's impact, the strength of the evidence, the size of the effects, the similarity between the context in which an intervention was studied and will be implemented, negative and/or offsetting effects, and how funding this intervention would affect decisions by other actors (e.g., local government, donor governments). See more on our page about our cost-effectiveness models .

Building relationships relevant to our work , for example with grantees and program staff at organizations we are funding or considering for funding, academics who specialize in interventions we are reviewing (e.g., malaria, malnutrition treatment, in-line water chlorination), and program staff at other funders who are also evaluating where to allocate funds.

Publishing reports and blog posts on our website. Transparency is a core value of ours and we aim to publish as much supporting information regarding our conclusions as we can. Program Officers write up findings and reasoning for publication on our website or summarize key points from their work in blog posts .

What is career development like?

After gaining experience on the team, Program Officers have the opportunity to develop into Senior Program Officers, who own high-impact, cost-effective grantmaking portfolios by deepening their expertise, growing their networks, and understanding the broader context within a specific grantmaking area. Senior Program Officers may then pursue a few pathways for career development based on their preferences and GiveWell's needs. Some choose to deepen and expand their portfolios as individual contributors, while others take on people management responsibilities. Another potential pathway is to move into the research track as a Researcher, focusing on leading research agendas rather than owning a grantmaking portfolio.

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 i