Senior Communications Officer, Editorial & Production

• Own the editorial quality and production of GiveWell ’s communications, ensuring that our work is clear, accurate, useful, carefully reasoned, and delivered on time. You will serve as GiveWell ’s senior editor for our communications content, with responsibility for returning or correcting work that does not meet our editorial bar.

• Build and manage the workflows, editorial standards, review processes, and production systems that allow GiveWell to create consistently excellent content at increasing scale.

• Lead planning, prioritization, and resource allocation for GiveWell ’s owned-content portfolio, managing dependencies and moving complex projects from concept through publication.

• Uphold GiveWell ’s voice and editorial standards across everything we publish, and help colleagues across the organization write within them.

• Own the development of GiveWell ’s recurring communications and reporting products, turning established priorities and messaging into clear, accurate content.

• Personally create, edit, or substantially shape our most complex, sensitive, or high-priority content.

• Oversee GiveWell ’s website content operations, including the people and processes responsible for routine updates and publishing, so that the site remains accurate, current, and consistent with our editorial standards.

• Serve as a senior editorial and production partner to teams across GiveWell , helping shape high-priority projects early, determine the right format and production approach, and establish clear roles, review paths, and timelines.

• Oversee the production of design, visual, and multimedia assets across GiveWell ’s channels, and the internal team and external contractors who create them.

• Manage and develop one or two team members initially, and determine how the function’s team and capabilities should grow over time.

• Exceptional communications judgment, including the ability to understand audience, context, risk, timing, and the underlying substance of a message.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to quickly make complex ideas clear and compelling without sacrificing rigor or nuance.

• A track record of building and leading: you have created or substantially rebuilt a team or function—not only run ones you inherited—and you have hired, developed, and managed people.

• Recent, hands-on excellence at your craft: you can point to work from the past few years that you personally produced or substantially shaped.

• Experience producing communications that are direct and factual while being engaging and effective with their target audiences—work that succeeds through substance and clarity rather than embellishment.

• Intellectual curiosity and the ability to engage deeply with GiveWell ’s research and ideas, even without prior experience in our giving areas.

• Experience advising executives or other senior decision-makers directly.

• Strong alignment with GiveWell ’s mission and values, including truth-seeking, transparency, and a commitment to communicating accurately and thoughtfully.

We also think these qualities will help you do well in the role and at GiveWell :

• People who can develop a strong point of view and hold it with confidence, but remain genuinely open to challenge, new information, and better ideas.

• Self-starters who take ownership, are comfortable creating structure in an evolving environment, and can make thoughtful decisions without always having complete information.

• People who are proactive and anticipatory, who identify opportunities, risks, bottlenecks, and communications needs before they become obvious.

• Collaborative leaders who raise the quality of the work around them and build strong relationships across teams.

• People who coordinate well with peers, resolve dependencies and disagreements, and make shared work clearer rather than more complicated.

• You want to step into a mature function with established systems, rather than build one while you run it.

• You do best with clear direction and established priorities. We’ll expect you to set most of your own, make most decisions yourself, and reach substantial autonomy within your first six months.

• You prefer advising on communications to producing and being accountable for them.

• You want sole ownership of an organization’s overarching communications strategy and brand. At GiveWell , the Vice President of Communications owns that direction; you would help shape it and lead your function within it.

• You want to lead a large team from day one. This team is small today, and much of the most difficult work will be yours to do directly.

• You find standards of precision and understatement limiting and frustrating. We work extremely hard to only communicate accurately what we know and what we don’t.

We’ll use a combination of interviews, written exercises, and work trials to assess the qualities described above. We’ll share more specific details if we invite you to move forward to any of the following stages, but our current plan is:

• Application

• Interview with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team

• Compensated, ~4-hour work trial

• Interview with the Vice President of Communications

• Values interview

• Compensated, ~4-hour work trial with the Vice President of Communications

• CEO interview and References

Note that you don’t need to submit a cover letter. We rely heavily on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we’re making early decisions. We encourage you to spend time responding to the application questions thoroughly and carefully.

: This role is set at the Senior Communications Officer level. For an exceptional candidate, we may consider hiring at the Communications Director level—with greater expectations, responsibilities, and compensation.

• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $250,000

• All other U.S. locations: $225,000

• International: Custom based on location. We can give you a specific number at the penultimate stage of the hiring process.

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GiveWell ’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad.

• Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California, or Brooklyn, NYC.

• International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. Given the managerial nature of this role, a successful candidate will need to work hours that have a certain minimum overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.

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: Our benefits include:

• Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)

• Four weeks of paid time off per year

• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave

• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships

• 403(b) retirement plan

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GiveWell is dedicated to finding and evaluating highly cost-effective global health and development opportunities, and we publish all the work, reasoning, and uncertainties behind our funding decisions. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify.

GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts. Trusted annually by tens of thousands of donors, GiveWell searches for highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most. Since 2007, more than 150,000 donors have given over $2.6 billion through GiveWell to the most promising programs its research has identified, which we estimate will save more than 340,000 lives.

GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, insecticide-treated nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity and grantmaking is devoted to cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.

GiveWell grants have:

• Helped governments navigate changes to the funding landscape and implement high-impact health programs, like HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.

• Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we funded a program to prevent tuberculosis among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India, that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.

• Provided funding to ensure that programs that recently faced foreign aid funding cuts could continue, like healthcare support and malnutrition treatment in northern Cameroon.

• Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.

• Tested our assumptions and refined our understanding through further research and data collection, including improved estimates of disease burden and studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality and the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income.

We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research to address our uncertainties and gathering independent monitoring and evaluation data about the programs we support. We change our minds when the evidence demands it. For more about GiveWell , listen to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with GiveWell ’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld.