Senior Livelihoods Researcher

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.

Update: We will stop accepting new applications for this role on November 26, 2026.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking a Senior Livelihoods Researcher to help us identify and fund the most cost-effective ways to improve living standards among the global poor. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us improve lives on a global scale.

Our livelihoods team is organized around thematic verticals, which includes cash transfers, broader social protection programs, education programs, and support for small and medium sized businesses in low-income countries. Across the portfolio, we try to maximize the social return on our investment, which we measure as the increase in relative consumption per $. We value consumption gains more highly among poorer populations, which has meant most of our grantmaking to date has focused on programs which support deprived populations within low-income countries (mostly in sub-Saharan Africa).

As a Senior Livelihoods Researcher, you’ll create and lead ambitious research agendas related to our portfolios of work and answer complex questions that will inform GiveWell’s grantmaking decisions. The researchers on our team combine rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

We’re open to a wide variety of professional development pathways depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on livelihoods. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and honing in on those that matter most. You’ll also communicate externally about your work and advise other researchers on the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell livelihoods team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these:

• What effect do rural trailbridges have on the consumption of nearby communities?

• What are long-run effects of unconditional cash transfers and ultra poor graduation programs on recipients?

• What would happen to prices and markets if we took cash transfer and ultra poor graduation programs to scale?

• How should GiveWell value interventions which try to reduce the variance of consumption (as opposed to increasing the average)?

• Several countries in sub-Saharan Africa have seen large scale-ups in donor-funded livelihoods programs over the last 30 years but very little movement in poverty headcount rates and median consumption per capita. Why?

Team structure

Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into eight teams:

• Five of the teams (Water, Nutrition, Malaria, Vaccines, and Livelihoods) focus on specific areas of grantmaking.

• The New Areas team focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell.

• The Cross-Cutting team focuses on methodological issues, research quality, and other big-picture concerns that cut across all of our research work.

• The Commons team provides generalized research support to each of the other teams, including landscaping research, vetting, and publishing.

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values . We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.

• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.

• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.

• Lean research team = huge personal impact. In 2026, our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.

• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.

About you

We expect the Senior Livelihoods Researcher to have

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in economics, statistics, public policy or related fields)

• Substantial professional experience in the livelihoods landscape (broadly defined). This could include experience in academic research and/or in program implementation or funding.

We expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful and happy on our team. This isn’t a full list, but hopefully it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:

• GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally energizing—you like our approach to research and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.

• You’re abnormally curious—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate others’ work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work—you aren’t defensive when your research comes under scrutiny.

• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird your work. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours and your team’s.

• You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don’t seem to rely on commensurate evidence. You carefully and legibly communicate about your confidence levels.

• You appreciate the value of an excellent reputation and strong relationships. You can moderate your directness and intensity when you’re communicating with external folks.

• You love a gnarly problem . You figure out the most important questions to answer, go deep on the details where they matter (and move on where they don’t), and reassess your mental models based on what you’ve learned.

• You constantly assess whether you and the team are working on the most important things.

If you’re interested in working on GiveWell’s research team but don’t have livelihoods expertise, consider applying to our generalist Senior Researcher role.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:

• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $308,000.

• All other U.S. locations: $280,000

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