Senior Researcher, Research Communication

About this role

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.

We're hiring for roles that will help us scale effectively. We expect to make one or more hires from this round, including a leadership-track hire who we believe can scale to build out a new function. This role (or roles) will shape how we communicate about our research, our reasoning, our uncertainties, and our mistakes, in keeping with our commitments to transparency and rigor.
The problem this role would solve and why it matters
GiveWell's Research teams own the work of determining which grants are most cost-effective: investigating existing programs, building and revising cost-effectiveness models, commissioning research to resolve our own uncertainties, and working with implementers to develop opportunities that don't yet exist but should. Our philanthropy and communications teams own the last mile of how we talk about that work, whether through a 1:1 conversation with a donor, a donor event, or scalable communications like blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts.
Between these teams sits a question: what are the most important and accurate things we should say about our work? Answering it requires a nuanced understanding of our research and our theories of change, and it is epistemically demanding, because our external communications are held to the standards of rigor, calibration, and honesty about uncertainty that we apply to our decision-making.
Today, answering these questions runs through a small group of senior leaders. But our funding is growing, and our programs are growing with it. The volume of research we need to cover and translate keeps expanding, as does the volume of complex, sophisticated donor questions, often from people considering making very large donations to our work. The result is a new-to-us problem: producing answers that meet GiveWell’s research bar, at speed and at volume.
The hard part of this work is rarely the phrasing. It's working out what we truly believe and what communicates that most effectively to those who follow our work. This matters far beyond fundraising. Sharing our work is central to our mission: we publish our reasoning so others can challenge it, and we change our minds when the evidence demands it. We believe excellent research communications could materially shape the direction of billions of dollars in funding from GiveWell donors and other actors, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
We see this role as critical to building a new function at GiveWell. You would help us reimagine and shape the substance of what we share with our donors and the outside world.
About the role
This senior role would own GiveWell's answers to the hardest questions we get about our work. Your responsibilities would include:

• Working out what statements our research supports, developing what we can claim and defend, testing that against the researchers who own the underlying analysis, and holding a high bar for accuracy when a simpler answer would be more convenient.

• Prioritizing across a portfolio of questions to deliver answers at the right altitude: which questions need a fast answer with correctly conveyed uncertainty, which warrant deeper research, and which point to gaps in our communication that are best served by published research.

• Supporting the CEO and our senior leadership in external communications and major donor engagement. A significant portion of the work, especially as this role ramps up, will support Elie Hassenfeld, our co-founder and CEO, in his direct work with our largest supporters. Over time, you would engage with donors directly on research questions.

• Setting the standard for external communications about GiveWell's research. Some communications go directly to individual donors, but our best work builds a platform that lets us communicate more effectively with everyone: tens of thousands of donors around the world, and partner organizations who may look to our work to inform their own.

• Producing work yourself to GiveWell’s standards of quality, including long-form write-ups explaining our research, data visualizations, and interactive tools that deepen engagement with our work. As the function scales, we expect this will extend to hiring and leading a team that produces the work. (See “Current and future team structure” below.)

Questions you might take on
More than anything else, this role is about how you engage with questions. Take, as an example, a question we often get from our donors: "How much room for more funding do you have?" We have an answer, but it isn't easy to state simply, because the question nests several others inside it: What, exactly, counts as room for more funding? Over what time frame? How much risk are we willing to take on with respect to future fundraising? Where could we be right, where could we be wrong, and what would change our view?
Answering well means knowing how to answer all of that.
Other questions you might take on include:

• Why did GiveWell set its moral weights the way it did, and how much would changing them affect our judgments?

• How much room for more funding does GiveWell have? How much do we need, by when, and to do what?

• What are the best…