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.
The Role
GiveWell is hiring a Senior Philanthropy Advisor to manage and advise a portfolio of our largest donors. This role will help shape our relationship strategy with donors giving seven- to ten-figure gifts and will have significant influence over how GiveWell’s philanthropy function grows and evolves. You will manage and advise a portfolio of our largest donors, serve as a leader within our philanthropy team, and be a thought partner to our senior leadership team.
Why We’re Hiring NowMany of our donors are analytical, quantitative thinkers, and their deep engagement with our research makes our work better. We've built a philanthropy team to match. We take the time to understand what our donors value, we treat their giving as a true partnership, and we invest in learning our own research deeply so we can help donors do the same. We measure our relationships in years, not quarters.
We face a historic opportunity to scale giving to high-impact causes and to save and improve lives around the world. To meet this moment, we are engaging a new generation of major philanthropists, while strengthening the partnerships model that has made our existing donor relationships so productive. We believe that deepening our philanthropic partnerships with our current and future major donors is one of the highest-leverage actions GiveWell can take to ensure significantly more funding for some of the world’s most cost-effective programs.
What You’ll Do
- Build long-term, trust-based relationships with major donors that deepen donors’ understanding of GiveWell’s work.
- Proactively identify the insights, data points, and narratives from GiveWell’s research that are most relevant to major donor decision-making.
- Drive and lead team-wide initiatives and significant projects to make our work accessible, from learning journey design, playbooks, and systems to donor events and donor communications.
- Translate GiveWell’s research into original donor-facing content that makes our work accessible to analytically sophisticated, time-poor major donors.
- Serve as a strategic advisor to GiveWell’s leadership.
- Drive improvements to our philanthropy culture, systems, and processes to improve how our philanthropy function operates and scales.
About You
You understand how people translate their values into action. You're comfortable connecting with a wide range of people, from the donor who wants to deeply understand every assumption in our model to the donor who wants a high-trust, low-friction recommendation they can act on quickly, and everyone in between.
Your background includes significant experience earning trust with discerning, analytic people, where you are a partner in somebody else's high-stakes decisions. You've experienced navigating this, not by telling them what to do, but by helping them think clearly and get the right information to support what they're trying to accomplish. You know how to help people navigate doubt and complexity. You are comfortable both bringing a clear point of view (for example, by saying, "Here's what I would do") and helping people strengthen their own judgment over time.
You are excited by intellectually demanding work. You are ready to engage with complex global health topics, including our cost-effectiveness models, program evaluation, and evidence quality. You are driven to get up to speed and be ready to explain them clearly to audiences who will push back on our thinking. You are excited to engage with hard follow-up questions and people who will expect rigorous answers. While you don't need prior global health experience, you will need to demonstrate you can get up to speed quickly on complex quantitative subject matter and translate it rigorously and credibly.
You bring high emotional intelligence, curiosity, and a clear sense of mission to your day-to-day work. You’re a collaborator who connects dots and builds relationships across teams.
You bring depth of leadership experience, and you are comfortable supporting strategic decisions and rolling up your sleeves to build and shape our work. You are ready to bring adaptive energy to this work while being comfortable deeply explaining your reasoning and taking time to reach high-quality decisions where it matters.
Strong candidates will have:
- A track record of managing sophisticated, high-stakes relationships—whether with major donors, ultra-high-net-worth clients, foundation officers, board members, or similarly discerning stakeholders in another field entirely.
- Exceptional relationship management skills, with high emotional intelligence, an advisory mindset, and the ability to hold a large amount of context about a person and synthesize it in real time.
- Interest in global health and development, and the ability to engage in complex research and ideas even without prior experience in the sector.
- Excellent communication skills, written and verbal—clear, tailored, and credible messaging for discerning stakeholders, including comfort producing original written content.
- Leadership skills to partner with senior staff and influence across teams collaboratively.
- Strong operational expertise: leading cross-team projects, building scalable processes, and translating strategy into action.
- Strong alignment with GiveWell’s mission and values, including truth-seeking, transparency, humility, and long-term trust-building.
Who Tends to do well:
- People who enjoy building relationships and understanding what motivates the people they work with
- People who can engage thoughtful, analytical audiences and handle nuanced conversations
- Fast learners who can pick up complex, unfamiliar subject matter and enjoy translating it verbally and into written content
- Self-starters who take ownership and work well in a collaborative, evolving team
- People who are proactive and anticipatory—who reach out before the other person knows they need something
- People who are comfortable sitting with complexity and helping others navigate uncertainty
- People who are enthusiastic about GiveWell's mission and values
Key Questions
What are some of the reasons I might not like this role?
- You prefer research or analysis over building relationships with people
- You struggle with initiating challenging or direct conversations
- You prefer highly structured environments with clear answers at all times
- You prefer to share information and let others draw conclusions, rather than offering their own synthesis and point of view
What does this interview process entail?
We'll use a combination of interviews, written exercises, and work trials to assess the qualities described above. We'll share more specific details if we invite you to move forward to any of the following stages, but our current plan is:
- Screen with our Manager, Talent Acquisition
- Compensated 4-hour work trial (written)
- Interviews with our VP, Philanthropy and Senior Manager, Philanthropy
- Additional work trial (live interview) with our VP, Philanthropy and a Senior Philanthropy Advisor
- Final Onsite in our Oakland, California headquarters, where you’ll interview with members of our executive leadership team in person (we will cover your travel expenses).
- References
Note that you don't need to submit a cover letter. We rely heavily on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions. We encourage you to spend time responding to the application questions thoroughly and carefully.
Details
- Team: You'll report to our VP of Philanthropy.
- Compensation:
- NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $220,000
- All other U.S. locations: $200,000
- Location: This position is eligible to work fully remotely within the US.
- Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC;. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to one of these physical office locations.
- 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.
- 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
- One week all-office closure
- 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
- Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
- Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
- Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date.
About GiveWell
GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.
GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than 340,000 lives.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, insecticide-treated nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.
GiveWell grants have:
- Helped governments navigate changes to the funding landscape and implement high-impact health programs, like HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
- Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we funded a program to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
- Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like healthcare support and malnutrition treatment in northern Cameroon.
- Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.
- Tested our assumptions and refined our understanding through further research and data collection, including improved estimates of disease burden and studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality and the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income.
We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research to address our uncertainties and gathering independent monitoring and evaluation data about the programs we support. We change our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell, listen to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at [email protected]. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell's Privacy Statement for Applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell's Work Trial Policy.
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