Research Analyst

The role

As a Research Analyst on the Commons team, you will support our broader research team in identifying cost-effective giving opportunities. Your work will contribute to GiveWell’s decisions about how hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent to save and improve the lives of people living in the lowest-income communities in the world. You will also play a key role in fulfilling our commitment to transparency and ensuring that the work we produce is accurate and high quality.

You will contribute to our work in a variety of ways, including:

• Quality checking pages we publish about our work and spreadsheets that we rely on to inform our decision making
• Writing public summaries of the reasoning behind our grant decisions
• Answering defined research questions via desk research (for example, "What options does a maize farmer in Malawi have for selling their product?" or "How difficult is it for adults in rural Mozambique to purchase basic health commodities like chlorine tablets or insecticide treated nets?")
• Summarizing results from the monitoring and evaluation reports that grantees send us
• Updating our cost-effectiveness analyses to reflect new information or analysis performed by other research staff
• Exploring ways to use AI tools to increase the efficiency and quality of our team's work
• Providing occasional project management support (more detail below)

Why this role may not be the right fit

• This is an entry-level research position. For your first year, you'll primarily conduct vetting work—rigorously checking the work outputs of more senior research team members for accuracy and clarity. You won’t be driving strategic decisions or leading major research initiatives.
• Your projects will be assigned rather than self-generated. Senior researchers and program officers will determine your work priorities (typically vetting and well-defined research tasks) based on team needs. You'll have opportunities to share ideas and contribute to scoping discussions, but you won't set research strategy or have autonomy over your research agenda in this role.
• You won't specialize in a single grantmaking area. We're looking for generalists who can contribute across our grantmaking teams. You'll develop deep analytical skills through vetting, but you won't become "the malaria person" or focus exclusively on one cause area or intervention type.

If this sounds exciting to you—if you want to spend at least a year becoming excellent at rigorous vetting work and gaining familiarity with the fundamentals of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses—then this role could be a great fit.

Team structure

Our research team is organized into subteams that each focus on a specific area of our grantmaking (malaria, water quality, vaccinations, etc.). The Commons team is external to these subteams; we provide shared and flexible research capacity so we can direct our effort toward the highest priority areas at a given time. As a Research Analyst on the Commons team, you will have opportunities to learn about and contribute to multiple areas of our work.