Chief of Staff - CRPO

GiveWell is an independent nonprofit research organization that makes grants to cost-effective global health and development organizations, supported by tens of thousands of individual donors. Our work is characterized by unusual levels of transparency and rigor relative to other philanthropic funders, and we were described early in our history as the "gold standard of giving."

We're hiring a Chief of Staff to Teryn Mattox, our Chief Research and Programs Officer. Teryn leads GiveWell’s research team (~75 people right now, likely 100+ by end of year) and is a senior member of GiveWell’s executive leadership team. 

What's happening at GiveWell

GiveWell is on track to direct over $1 billion in grants this year. This will make us one of the top few private funders of global health and development in the world, and represents a step change from ~$400M in 2025 grantmaking. Our best guess is that our grantmaking will reach multiple billions annually as early as 2027.

Few organizations in any sector grow from $400M to multiple billions in annual funding within a few years. We’ll be facing hard problems as we scale, including these:

• We'll no longer be operating as a marginal funder, filling cost-effective gaps in global health programming. At this scale, our behavior will affect all actors in the global health system in new ways, and we'll need to explore partnerships with country governments, multilateral institutions, and other funders.
• We'll need to expand our core research and grantmaking team, monitoring and learning functions, and central operations capacity.
• We'll grapple with the standard problems of organizational scale-up: management capacity and quality, decision-making bottlenecks, coordination overhead, internal communications and team structure, maintaining high talent density, and promoting internal development.
• We'll face new pressures that push against the transparency and rigor that have characterized our work for the last two decades, and we'll need to figure out how to stay focused on maximizing impact.

Teryn is the executive responsible for steering the research team through this transition. Her Chief of Staff will work on these problems every day, with an unusual amount of access and influence. This is a senior position that sits on the Research Leadership Team, and we expect the person in it to operate as Teryn’s deputy while building a small office to support her.

The job

Thought partner

You'll spend a lot of time with Teryn, joining meetings, 1:1s, and communicating asynchronously. You need to know what Teryn knows so you can push back on her thinking and help her make better decisions.

Concretely, this could look a few ways:

• Teryn talks through a difficult situation (an issue with a direct report, a tricky team structure decision, a strategic question), and you help her figure out what to do.
• When Teryn learns something from an external meeting or conversation, you help her process implications and next steps.
• You review Teryn’s running log of open questions, worries, and decisions, and turn it into action.

Spotting problems and opportunities

You’ll spend a lot of time building context and relationships with team members by reading internal documents, joining meetings, and attending in-person retreats. You will develop substantive opinions on what’s going on in all departments (not just research), and what we should be doing differently across the board. You will also identify and execute fixes. Those fixes will likely be complicated cross-functional projects that include external and internal communications, publishing, recruiting, financial planning, and more.

Building Teryn’s personal office

Teryn expects to build out a small team supporting her over the next year or two, likely including a deputy chief of staff and administrative and project management capacity. You'll help design this office, hire into it, and likely manage the team. This is a chance to build something from scratch inside an organization that is scaling quickly.

Unsticking complicated projects

There are a number of projects that are on Teryn’s plate because there is no other obvious owner or because they require executive-level coordination across teams. You will own some of these projects, and in other cases support Teryn in making them go more quickly. Here are some live examples:

• Right now our staffing approach (i.e. who is assigned to which teams, and what teams exist) has been built in a reactive way over time. It’s likely suboptimal for our current state, and almost certainly for future GiveWell. 
• Transparency is a core part of our value proposition to donors, but we’re very far behind on publications and it’s been hard to identify the right solution.
• We probably need to hire people to build and lead new functions. We need to determine what are the most high priority hiring goals and think through how to staff those functions. 

What success looks like

This job requires deep immersion in GiveWell's work, and we expect it will take a few months before you can give excellent advice on arbitrary problems. After six months to a year, success looks like:

• Teryn seeks out your input whenever something is on her mind, and you give her good advice. 
• Teryn's attention is concentrated on the decisions and relationships that absolutely require her input, and you (and her office) are credibly holding much of the rest.
• Important strategic work is moving quickly, rather than being bottlenecked on Teryn’s personal capacity.
• You have enough cross-organization context and relationships that you catch issues before they do damage. In some cases you solve such issues yourself, in others you elevate them to Teryn and the executive team.
• We scale without losing what makes GiveWell special. You absorb GiveWell's core values and help us maintain them as we grow.

What this role is not

• You won't take on functional leadership over research operations or grantmaking areas.
• The most important strategic decisions will rest with Teryn and GiveWell's leadership teams, not with you alone. But you will have full context on those decisions, you will be in the room for them, and you will be expected to shape them.
• You won't be an executive assistant or scheduler, though you'll sometimes need to jump in on time-sensitive logistics. Over time you will likely hire and manage people in Teryn's office who handle administrative and project management work.

What we're looking for

This is a senior role. We expect strong candidates will typically have 10 or more years of work experience, including time operating at or near the executive level of a complex organization. That might mean serving as chief of staff to a CEO, holding a C-level role, being a partner or senior leader at a consulting firm, or leading a functional team through rapid scale. Experience in global health, development, or philanthropy is valuable but not required. We care more about demonstrated capability than about any particular resume; if your background is unusual but you're exceptional at this kind of work, we want to hear from you.

The qualities we care most about:

• Independent judgment. You form your own views and hold them under pressure. You're neither overawed nor overconfident around senior leaders, and you're willing to deliver critical feedback, including to the person you work for.
• Execution. You’re proactive, high output, and detail-oriented. You deliver on time and don’t drop balls.
• A practical orientation and general bias toward action, paired with good judgment about when to slow down.
• Extremely clear writing, and the ability to quickly skill up on and synthesize complicated bodies of work, including quantitative research.
• Discretion. You'll hold sensitive information about people, organizations, and funders, and you'll need the trust of colleagues across the organization.
• Comfort with external stakeholders. You'll sometimes represent Teryn with partners and funders.
• Experience managing and developing people, or clear readiness to do so.
• Low ego about the work. We need someone who's excited about contributing to GiveWell's mission and doesn't feel that creating a meeting agenda or booking a conference space is beneath them when it's important.
• General knowledge of the space we work in, and ideally genuine enthusiasm for GiveWell's project in particular.

Logistical details

• Salary will be commensurate with experience. This is a senior hire and we intend to pay competitively for it. We offer excellent benefits, including fully covered health insurance, generous parental leave, and family formation support.
• GiveWell is a remote-first organization. Teryn is located in Portland, Oregon. You would need to be located in the United States, and you should expect regular travel for time with Teryn, company and team events, international conferences, and site visits.
• We can sponsor U.S. visas in some cases; please let us know early if you'd need that.
• The role is open now and we will review applications on a rolling basis.