Program Officer

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.

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 d