Chief of Staff (Dan Brown)

Chief of Staff to Dan Brown, Senior Program Officer

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 Dan Brown, who leads our New Areas grantmaking portfolio and oversees other team leaders including our Water and Livelihoods grantmaking portfolios. These portfolios are critical to GiveWell’s ability to expand quickly into a multi-billion dollar funder in the next few years, and we think that successful expansion could counterfactually save tens of thousands of lives, increase incomes for the world’s poorest people, and prevent many life-years from being impaired by illness and disability. The right Chief of Staff for Dan could help us make much faster progress toward those goals.

What’s happening at GiveWell

Over our 20-year history, our annual funds directed have grown from hundreds of thousands of dollars to  a target of over $500M in 2026.

We’re now anticipating substantial further growth as early as 2027, which could increase our annual funding to several billion dollars every year. We’re early in our planning process for this new growth, but we know that we need to hire aggressively to deploy funds well.

Expanding to an annual volume of multiple billions of dollars will be challenging. At this scale, we might face a few new problems:

• We’ll no longer be operating as a marginal funder, filling cost-effective gaps in general global health programming. Instead, we could be in the top few non-governmental funders of global health and development programs. As a result, our behavior will affect all actors in the global aid system (donor governments, recipient governments, and other funders) in new ways. We’ll explore  coordinating or structuring partnerships with country governments, multilateral institutions, and other funders to ensure that our funding has the highest possible impact. We’ll also need to figure out how to better manage our public positioning and influence.
• We’ll need to expand our core research teams, monitoring and learning functions, and central operations capacity.
• We’ll need to grapple with the standard problems of organizational scale-up, like management capacity and quality, decision-making bottlenecks, coordination overhead, internal communications, maintaining high talent density, promoting internal development, and more.
• It will be more difficult than ever to ensure that we remain laser-focused on maximizing our impact, and that we remain a transparent and rigorous funder when new pressures push against those things.

The job

Dan is a senior leader who leads GiveWell’s New Areas team and manages the leaders of our Water and Livelihoods portfolios.

• The New Areas team has a wide remit of grantmaking areas, including family planning; tuberculosis; HIV/AIDS; medical oxygen; maternal, neonatal, and child health, and more. The team is also the default home for all exploratory areas, and we are recruiting a new cause prioritisation lead within New Areas to oversee more emerging work. 
• The Water team focuses on chlorination, water quality, and more.
• The Livelihoods team focuses on interventions that increase the incomes of very poor people, including by funding direct cash transfers and non-cash support.
• We are also recruiting leaders of two new teams (health systems strengthening and market shaping) who will report into Dan. 

 

As GiveWell likely expands into a multi-billion dollar funder in 2027 and beyond, we expect these portfolios to collectively become a substantial amount of GiveWell’s total funding.

Dan’s Chief of Staff will ensure that he makes swift progress on this work and will be a critical contributor to its quality and success. They’ll proactively notice and take action on things that could improve the Research team’s efficiency, ambition, and impact.

We think your work will have two main streams:

• Supporting all of Dan’s work, including by helping him make the right strategic prioritization decisions, providing thought partnership on tough problems, ensuring that high-level goals turn into action, sharing critical feedback regularly, managing information flow, and developing strong relationships with research leadership team members and Dan’s reports.
• Managing special projects, including by steering Dan’s reports, scoping and owning some projects yourself, and delegating execution of others to the right team members. These special projects could be anything that contributes to the success of Dan’s portfolio, including end-to-end bespoke hiring rounds, strategic redirections, and external partnerships.

This job covers a lot of surface area, and the problems you’ll be working on are sufficiently complex and new to GiveWell that it’s difficult for us to map out the exact job duties in advance. We’ll want you to work with Dan to figure out how this role looks, and we’re looking for someone who’s excited to work in a flexible and shifting environment. We’d love to chat through your questions.

What we’re looking for

We’re open to a variety of professional backgrounds, but we think the strongest candidates for this role will likely have at least 10 years of professional experience (inclusive of advanced academic training) and will have collaborated closely with senior leaders on workstreams that require making decisions under uncertainty, reasoning carefully in writing, thinking at the team or organization level, skilling up quickly in new technical areas, and managing large groups of internal and external stakeholders.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of potential good-fit archetypes:

• An experienced senior or special advisor in the civil service
• A management consultant with a quant-heavy academic background
• An international development professional with research experience who’s spent the last few years in management and leadership roles
• An experienced Chief of Staff who’s excited about applying their skills to GiveWell’s problems

Even if you don’t perfectly match one of the archetypes above, we’d encourage you to apply if you care deeply about GiveWell’s work and resonate with the soft qualities described at the top of this section.

How we’ll approach the hiring process

All parts of the hiring process are still in development; we’re very early in this process and currently talking to a small group of referred candidates. It’s unlikely that we’ll post this role publicly; we expect that our hire will likely come from our network.

We’ll likely start with a simple application to collect basic information about you. A short informational call will follow, in which we’ll try to get a deeper understanding of what skills/experience you bring to the table and what’s motivating your interest in the role. Here, as in every stage of the process, we’ll also answer any questions you have—mutual fit for a role like this is extremely important.

If we’re mutually interested in moving forward after the informational call, we’ll proceed with some combination of discussions with GiveWell’s research leadership team, extensive reference checks, and a compensated work trial. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to interact with Dan to assess mutual fit, and at late stages we’ll also encourage you to run reverse reference checks on Dan by speaking with his manager, peers, and reports.

Logistical details

• Compensation: Our current best guess is that this role will be salaried at USD 150k-200k (converted to GBP at a smoothed exchange rate) depending on experience, qualifications, and placement on our internal salary scales. We’re happy to discuss salary offerings in more detail at later stages of the application process. We intend to pay competitively.
• Location: Dan is located in London, UK. You would need to be located in the United Kingdom. You should expect regular travel for company and team events, international conferences, and site visits (and for in-person time with Dan, if you’re in the UK but based outside of London).
• Do we have flexibility on location? Yes, we’re willing to be flexible for exceptional candidates who are in timezones very near the UK, who wish to work in countries where we have existing Employer Of Record (EOR) providers. We’re willing, but unlikely to make exceptions for strong candidates who:
• Wish to work in countries where we do not have EOR providers (because new EORs are expensive to set up)
• Wish to work in timezones 3+ hours removed from the UK (because we believe this will inhibit candidates’ ability to work closely with Dan)
• Visas: We’re unable to sponsor UK visas.
• Benefits: We offer generous benefits for our employees in the UK and other international locations (including supplemental insurance for services not covered by national health systems), with only slight variation from our U.S. benefits package.