GiveWell is a nonprofit that operates like a crowdsourced foundation. We identify and fund cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health. We’ve grown from raising $1.5 million in 2010 to over $600 million in 2022; we are now one of the largest private funders of global health and development worldwide. We’ve seen similar growth on our relatively small team—our staff has quickly grown from about 20 people in 2018 to about 65 today.
Having excellent technical infrastructure is critical to ensure that our staff can do their work effectively and securely. We’re hiring a senior tech leader who can help set up our tech team for success as we continue to scale. This person will report to and work closely with our Director of Operations to develop the technology strategy, tactics, and team that will support GiveWell’s continued growth.
What makes this opportunity unique?
- Have an outsized impact with your career. GiveWell’s work saves and improves lives around the world, and you’ll help ensure we'll be able to do this work efficiently and effectively.
- Work with brilliant, motivated colleagues. You’ll be on a team of smart, ambitious people who are passionate about doing good in the world.
- Guide the buildout of a tech team during a high-growth phase. GiveWell is about 65 people today, and we expect to grow to 100+ over the next two to three years. Our technical needs are also growing quickly, and you’ll have significant influence over our org-wide tech stack.
- You’ll have the resources to build a world-class team. We’re an unusually well-funded nonprofit, and we want our operations team focused on providing A+ support rather than navigating hard trade-offs under restrictive budgets.
- High pay, high expectations, high performance. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture, and our salaries are competitive with nonprofit peers.
Core responsibilities
The main focus of this role is broad ownership of GiveWell’s technology function. Specifically, we expect you to:
- Define our strategy and road map for how tech will grow and support GiveWell.
- Manage and build a team to execute against that strategy and road map.
- You’ll start managing a team of two Salesforce administrators, a small set of contractors, and our MSP IT vendor.
- We expect to make additional hires based on the road map you develop. Our best guess is that we need at least two additional hires soon (one junior IT staff, one junior Salesforce developer).
What does our technology function include?
Our current technology team is primarily focused on IT, infosec, data engineering, and CRM (Salesforce) administration. We expect the scope of tech work to expand along with the needs of our team as we grow.
Below we share the scope of our technology work. You’ll be responsible for managing the team that executes each of these responsibilities well—we don't expect you to carry out all (or even many) of the items below as an individual contributor.
At GiveWell, our technology function does the following:
- Provides GiveWell staff with the hardware and software to do their work.
- Provisions, manages, and secures staff devices.
- Administers the basic software we use in our day-to-day work: Google Workspace, Asana, Box, etc.
- Adds new technologies to our tech stack to increase productivity and security.
- Manages our systems to ensure they fulfill business needs, provide secure access, and deliver a high-quality user experience.
- Develops and maintains our Salesforce instance.
- Maintains and improves our CRM to help staff manage day-to-day workflows, maintain accurate records of our donors and their communication, and integrate with other tools, like email systems and Salesforce plugins.
- Supports our fundraising team.
- Ensures our payment processors run smoothly and integrate with our other systems.
- Maintains our website, servers, and associated systems (WAF, CDN, etc.) to ensure they are easy to use, are kept up-to-date, and meet the needs of different users.
- Ensures we have the infrastructure and data quality to support decision making.
- Provides reliable data we can use to generate reports. This includes data about:
- Donors and donations, grants, development team activity, and other information related to our fundraising and grantmaking.
- Emails we've sent and engagement with those emails.
- User behavior on our website (Google Suite).
- Financials (Intacct).
- Internal processes (e.g., help desk stats and Asana usage).
- Makes it easy to generate reports and answer other questions that rely on our data
- Provides reliable data we can use to generate reports. This includes data about:
- Provides a high level of customer service.
- Works with users to ensure our technology solves their underlying problems (rather than just doing what they ask for).
- Helps staff troubleshoot technological issues.
- Develops best practices and provides training to employees.
- Owns cybersecurity and ensures we have secure, compliant systems and up-to-date policies.
- Builds and maintains secure systems that meaningfully reduce the risk of security issues.
- Oversees and resolves security incidents.
- Provides ongoing cybersecurity training for staff, ensuring security requirements are understood and staff members are engaged in proactive security measures.
- Collaborates with multiple stakeholders to achieve the right balance of security and efficiency.
- Ensures our technology infrastructure is compliant with relevant laws (e.g., we have the necessary tracking, systems, and workflows to be compliant with GDPR and PCI).
- Maintains and updates our existing technology policies and develops new policies as needed.
- Manages the budget, vendors, and contractors that we use to accomplish the above.
Who might be a good fit
The ideal candidate has built and scaled a tech team at least once, and is excited to leverage their past experience and deep subject matter expertise to help GiveWell grow and excel. We don’t have a preference for staff with nonprofit experience and would be excited to review applications from candidates looking to transition from the private sector.
We expect that strong candidates will have almost all of the qualities listed below:
- You are an experienced leader.
- You’ve managed teams across the full employee life cycle (hiring, separating, developing, and managing performance).
- You’ve owned a complex, open-ended set of responsibilities that required you to set and execute a strategy as an organizational leader, not just as a consultant working with a client.
- You’re excited about hands-on leadership. Because we’re a small team, we need leaders who can pitch in and take on some projects themselves rather than always delegating.
- We don’t have a hard requirement for years of experience, but we expect that the most qualified candidates will have around ten years of experience, much of it directly relevant.
- You have the necessary technical expertise.
- You have the hands-on technical expertise to effectively supervise and contribute to GiveWell’s technical work.
- You have experience with a large, complex, and heavily customized CRM platform (much of our work is either in Salesforce or in systems integrated with Salesforce).
- You're familiar with and have expertise in cloud-based systems, not just on-premise tech. We are a distributed team, and most of our systems are cloud-based.
- You communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- You’ve worked with other senior leaders across an organization and are adept at translating high-level strategy into technical solutions.
- You can effectively communicate technical opportunities and constraints to help leaders navigate high-level strategy decisions.
- You can earn trust from other leaders and teams such that they’re enthusiastic to involve your team and confident you’ll be able to support their work.
- You just get stuff done.
- You are skilled at planning and managing projects, including identifying and focusing on the most decision-relevant aspects of a project and communicating effectively with teammates.
- You’re adept at navigating challenging strategic or interpersonal situations (e.g., separations from employment, thorny cultural problems) and coaching others as they do the same.
- You fit well within GiveWell’s work culture.
- You’re excited to work in a small, ambitious, and growing organization (and all the opportunities and challenges that come with that).
- You have a low-ego approach to work. You’re excited to have transparent conversations about how to solve problems, and you're enthusiastic about receiving frequent feedback.
- You’re wildly proactive and are comfortable—even thrive in—ambiguity and a changing organization.
- You are passionate about helping to improve global health and alleviate global poverty.
- You’re excited about GiveWell’s organizational values and our Operations team culture.
GiveWell is looking for exceptional people who want to make a positive impact through their work. Please apply if this role would make you excited to come to work every day, even if you have a non-traditional professional background or don’t perfectly fit each element of the role.
Key info
Position: Head of Technology
Compensation:
- Tier 1 (San Francisco Bay Area or New York City): $191,400
- Tier 2 (all other US locations): $173,500
Reports to: Director of Operations
Location: GiveWell’s operations team works mostly remotely within the US. You can work fully remotely or work a hybrid schedule in our Oakland, California office or in our Brooklyn, NYC coworking space.
Travel: We host in-person, all-staff Visit Weeks at our Oakland office about four times per year, though the cadence and location may change. Visit Weeks play a critical role in building relationships between our mostly-remote staff, and we expect our Head of Technology to attend all Visit Weeks (barring special circumstances).
Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.
Timeline: We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis and aim to make an offer by the end of June 2024. We’d like you to start as soon as possible after extending you an offer, but we’re happy to adjust timelines for exceptional candidates. We encourage you to submit your application by mid-May 2024, though we don’t currently have a deadline for applications (we’ll update this page if that changes).
Benefits: 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
You can see our full list of benefits here.
To apply
Apply here. We only accept applications through our website. Please email us at jobs@givewell.org with any additional questions.
About GiveWell
GiveWell makes grants to support cost-effective programs that save and improve lives. We focus on global health and poverty alleviation in the lowest-income parts of the world because that is where we've found we can have the greatest impact.
Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In 2022, we made over $400 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we've directed has saved more than 200,000 lives.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of top charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.
Recent grants have:
- Helped governments to implement high-impact health programs, like in-line chlorination of drinking water in India and HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
- Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our recent grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.
- Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don't have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative's Incubator and Evidence Action's Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we recently funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
- Tested our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers' income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.
We never take for granted that GiveWell's work is good for the world. 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 and external analysis to uncover our own mistakes and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.
Additional information
If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at jobs@givewell.org.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell.
We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.