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.

Your decisions will inform the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to dozens of grantees. 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 late