Research Associate (Remote) – Giving What We Can

Job Description

Giving What We Can (GWWC) is seeking a Research Associate to strengthen the research that underpins our work as we grow towards our goal of 1 million pledgers donating $3 billion USD to high-impact charities annually.

You will join a small but growing research team responsible for helping a growing community of over 10,500 pledgers give as effectively as possible. Your work will be vital in ensuring we continue to offer high-quality giving opportunities that concretely address some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as extreme poverty, the suffering of animals in factory farms, and global catastrophic risks facing current and future generations.

Your impact in this role

Your work will help inform where a growing ~$80 million USD in annual charitable donations made by our community are directed, so that they most effectively improve the lives of others. You will add critical capacity to a small research team: stress-testing our work, deepening our evaluations, and helping ensure that our communications are held to the same standards of reliability and integrity, even as our output grows. Thousands of donors rely on GWWC for high-quality giving recommendations and effective giving guidance — your work to improve our research decisions could ultimately improve the lives of millions of sentient beings.

Key responsibilities

Co-determine which programmes we include on our donation platform and recommend to donors (~55%)

• Support high-quality decision-making in the evaluating evaluators project by conducting independent investigations.
• Review and stress-test other team members’ evaluator investigations, and provide input on which key questions to prioritise.
• Support the writing and review process for our public evaluator evaluation reports (see an example report).
• Gather and synthesise evidence from impact-focused evaluators relevant to our ‘other supported programmes’ decisions.
• Evaluate existing and potential supported programmes against our inclusion criteria to inform onboarding decisions.

Guard the epistemic quality of GWWC’s content (~25%)

• Review GWWC content and communications (e.g. social media posts, videos, newsletters, press releases) to ensure they are in line with our research views, high epistemic standards, and team values.
• Contribute to the maintenance of GWWC’s online research content (e.g., comparing charities page and cause area pages) and tools (e.g., How Rich Am I Calculator and Birth Lottery) to ensure they are accurate and up-to-date.

Contribute to internal monitoring and evaluation (~20%)

• Conduct specific analyses that support GWWC’s regular internal impact evaluations and ongoing impact monitoring.
• Support the writing and review process for our public impact evaluation reports.
• Provide other GWWC teams with high-quality research outputs that can inform their strategic decisions.

We expect a successful applicant to develop quickly within the role over time and take on increasing responsibility for specific work streams within the GWWC research team such as a specific cause area.

Ideal candidate profile

We know that confidence can sometimes hold people back from applying. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. If you’re excited about this role and think you could be a great fit, we strongly encourage you to apply.

While we expect a successful candidate would have some prior research experience (e.g., academic research projects, research fellowships, policy analysis), we are open to a wide variety of profiles. We are open to entry level candidates (0-2 years of experience), who would be placed within the first half of the salary range, but also to more senior hires (e.g. up to 4-5 years of experience), who would be placed within the second half of the salary range. What we truly care about is your ability to perform effectively in the role.

This means having the following essential skills and traits:

• Evidence integration and judgement under uncertainty. You can weigh different types of evidence — quantitative estimates, qualitative assessments, expert opinion — and reach a considered view even when the picture is incomplete or conflicting. You’re comfortable saying “I think X, with these caveats” rather than deferring indefinitely.
• Conceptual thinking. You can step back from the details and evaluate whether an argument, model, or framework hangs together as a whole — whether the pieces are internally consistent and whether the approach actually tracks what it claims to. You think at the level of “does this make sense?” not just “is this number right?”
• Strong analytical skills. You’re comfortable working with quantitative data — whether that’s interrogating a spreadsheet model, interpreting a cost-effectiveness estimate, or spotting where numbers don’t add up. You also notice when an argument relies on a hidden assumption or when a claim doesn’t quite follow from the evidence presented.
• Strategic prioritisation. When faced with a sticky research question and limited time, you zoom out, identify what matters most for the decision at hand, and focus there — rather than getting lost in every detail.
• Clear reasoning and communication. You can summarise complex evidence concisely, explain your reasoning transparently, and flag your uncertainties. Your written work is something others can build on because they can see why you reached your conclusions.
• Alignment with GWWC’s mission and values. You have a strong motivation to make the world a better place and a clear alignment with GWWC’s mission, team values, and community values. You care more about finding the truth than defending a position, and you change your mind when the evidence points that way.

Beneficial skills and experience (we expect you to bring some of these, not all of them):

• Comfort with key research concepts in effective giving — such as marginal cost-effectiveness, counterfactuality, and quantitative models of charitable impact — whether through formal training (e.g., the Ambitious Impact Research Training Programme, an EA fellowship, or similar), prior work in impact-focused charity evaluation or grantmaking, or self-directed study
• Academic or professional research experience — particularly involving evidence synthesis or evaluating the quality of others’ research
• Experience with monitoring and evaluation or impact assessment (e.g., in a non-profit, government, or development context)
• Editorial judgement: experience identifying where written content oversimplifies or goes beyond what the evidence supports — not just surface-level fact-checking
• Experience querying and analysing data using programming languages such as SQL, R, or Python
• Familiarity with GWWC’s existing research, the effective giving ecosystem, or specific cause areas (e.g., global health and development, animal welfare, existential risk reduction)

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package, including health insurance, budgets for mental health and wellbeing and professional development, flexible working arrangements, parental leave and support, and pension. There is some variation in the benefits depending on your location, to be confirmed in the offer letter.