Principal Researcher - AI Economic Preparedness

Key Details

Compensation: $150,000–$190,000

Location: Remote, with regular overlap with European and US working hours

Start date: January 2027

Travel: ~10–20%, including international travel

About Windfall

Windfall Trust is a policy research organization preparing governments and institutions for AI-driven economic disruption. We bring together researchers, economists, and decision-makers to map out impacts and surface workable options.

Windfall's mission is to ensure that the economic benefits of advanced AI are broadly shared, rather than captured by a few. We advise countries on their economic preparedness for transformative AI (TAI), drawing on our wider research, scenario workshops with economists, policymakers and civil society leaders, and the Policy Atlas, an evolving repository of policy options available to governments. We also have an internal database of AI economic indicators called the Windfall Observatory.

About the role

Windfall is running AI economic preparedness programs with national governments across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Each program examines how advanced AI could affect a country’s development model (e.g., job automation exposure, labor-intensive manufacturing, traded services, remittances or commodity exports, fiscal situation), and helps its government decide what to monitor and how to respond.

Windfall is hiring a Principal Researcher to anchor the research behind these programs. You will own the analytical core of our country work: the methods we use to assess a country’s economic exposure to AI, the quality of the evidence that reaches governments, and the tools, such as the Observatory and the Policy Atlas, that our regional teams rely on. You will work directly with the Director of Research and the Regional Principals, and you will help shape how Windfall’s research agenda develops as the program grows to fifteen or more countries in 2027.

We are looking for an experienced researcher who wants to build something, not only contribute to it. We will also consider candidates with a shorter track record who can show the analytical depth and judgment the role demands.

What you'll do

Your work will span six areas:

• Research direction and methods: Develop Windfall’s country assessment methodology. Decide how we measure AI exposure, fiscal and labor-market vulnerability and early-warning indicators, and keep those methods defensible to economists at finance ministries and multilateral institutions.

• Quality and review: Review analysis before it reaches governments, partners and funders. Set standards for data sourcing, estimation and the treatment of uncertainty across country engagements.

• Country analysis: Develop the starting hypothesis for each country: where advanced AI could affect its economy, labor market and public finances, and which early indicators could show it. Source and analyze the data behind the Observatory (e.g., World Bank, IMF, ILO, national statistical offices) and extend it where country work requires.

• Writing and briefing: Produce country briefs, scenario designs, workshop reports and comparative findings, and turn them into short explainers for officials, partners and funders.

• Policy tools: Drive the development of Windfall’s research tools, including AI exposure dashboards, public opinion surveys, scenario reports and maps of policy options, and ensure they are grounded in sound evidence.

• Team and partners: Guide and mentor researchers and analysts working across country engagements. Represent Windfall’s research with academic economists, multilateral research departments and national statistical offices, and build the external relationships that strengthen our evidence base.

What you'll bring

• Typically 8+ years of experience in economic research, policy research or government advisory, or a PhD in economics or a closely related field with substantial applied experience

• Deep grounding in development economics, such as labor markets, informality, structural transformation, trade or public finance, and a record of applying it to real policy questions

• Demonstrated quantitative skill: you have designed and executed empirical analysis with country-level or firm-level data, and you can judge when an estimate is solid enough to put in front of a minister

• Experience guiding the research of others, whether as a team lead, a project director or a reviewer of analytical work

• Clear, rigorous writing for senior government and multilateral audiences

• Experience working with governments, think tanks or international organizations, ideally in low- and middle-income countries

• A collaborative, reliable working style suited to a small team spread across time zones, and the judgment to run several workstreams with little oversight

• A serious interest in how advanced AI could reshape economies, jobs and public finances

Nice to have:

• Research that has been peer-reviewed, officially adopted or publicly scrutinized, such as journal publications, multilateral reports or government-commissioned work

• Experience at a multilateral or development organization, a central bank or finance ministry research unit, or in strategy consulting

• A background in foresight or scenario planning

• Working knowledge of Python, R or Stata and of AI coding tools such as Claude Code

• Experience convening expert networks or working groups

• Experience in, or a working language of, one or more of the regions Windfall works in