Senior Vaccination Researcher

Summary

GiveWell is seeking a Senior Vaccination Researcher to help us direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective vaccination programs that we can find. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

Our vaccination grantmaking is focused on increasing coverage of routine immunization in children under the age of two in areas with high burden of vaccine-preventable disease. This has included supporting targeted outreach and mobile vaccination, demand-side incentives, and support for malaria vaccine rollout. In the future, we may expand into new areas such as campaigns, subsidizing vaccine procurement, supply chain support, surveillance and outbreak response, and R&D for vaccines or vaccine delivery technology. Vaccination is one of our fastest-growing areas, from $12 million in 2024 to $50 million in 2025 and more than $70 million expected in 2026.

As a Senior Vaccination Researcher, you’ll create and lead ambitious research agendas related to our portfolios of work and answer complex questions that will inform GiveWell’s grantmaking decisions. The researchers on our team combine rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

We’re open to a wide variety of professional development pathways depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on vaccination. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and home in on those that matter most. You’ll also communicate externally about your work and mentor and advise other researchers on the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell vaccination team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment.

What you might work on in your first year:

• How should GiveWell’s portfolio of investments change in response to new technologies and shifts in government or funder resources and priorities?
• What are the most promising opportunities for grant-making in areas such as surveillance and outbreak response and R&D for vaccines or vaccine delivery technology? How should we prioritize those relative to current core areas?
• How can we improve our methods for evaluating the impact of programs on vaccination coverage? How can we collect more useful data and combine various sources of information to generate a holistic picture of which programs to expand and which to exit?
• What are the core differences between GiveWell's cost-effectiveness model and other vaccine cost-effectiveness models and what learnings from the external models should we apply to our model?
• What is the best design for a study to improve available estimates of the impact of key childhood vaccines on disease-specific mortality or all-cause mortality?

The Senior Vaccination Researcher will help shape a major annual grantmaking portfolio, own grant investigations end-to-end (from research question through grant recommendation), and represent GiveWell to external counterparts. You'll have significant latitude to propose new areas of work.

Team structure

Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into seven teams:

• Five of the teams (Livelihoods, Malaria, Nutrition, Vaccination, and Water) focus on specific areas of grantmaking.
• The New Areas team focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell.
• The Cross-Cutting team focuses on methodological issues, research quality, and other big-picture concerns that cut across all of our research work.
• The Commons team provides generalized research support to each of the other teams, including landscaping research, vetting, and publishing.

There are currently four people on our vaccination team.

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values. We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.
• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.
• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.
• Lean research team = huge personal impact. In 2022, we directed about $440 million with a research staff of less than 40 people.
• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.

About you

We expect the Senior Vaccination Researcher to have

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, statistics, economics or related fields)
• Substantial professional experience in the vaccination landscape (broadly defined). This could include experience in epidemiological or health economics modeling, and/or in program implementation or funding.

We expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful and happy on our team. This isn’t a full list, but hopefully it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:

• GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally energizing—you like our approach to research and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.
• You’re abnormally curious—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate others’ work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work—you aren’t defensive when your research comes under scrutiny.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird your work. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours and your team’s.
• You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don’t seem to rely on commensurate evidence. You carefully and legibly communicate about your confidence levels.
• You appreciate the value of an excellent reputation and strong relationships. You can moderate your directness and intensity when you’re communicating with external folks.
• You love a gnarly problem. You figure out the most important questions to answer, go deep on the details where they matter (and move on where they don’t), and reassess your mental models based on what you’ve learned.
• You constantly assess whether you and the team are working on the most important things.

If you’re interested in working on GiveWell’s research team but don’t have vaccination expertise, consider applying to our generalist Senior Researcher role.

The details

• Compensation: We set salaries using a location-based tier system. Our pay for this role:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $241,000.
• All other U.S. locations: $219,000.
• International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally-denominated currency. We can share a precise figure upon request after the first work trial stage.
• 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, plus a one week organization-wide summer break
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely. A successful candidate will need to commit to a work schedule that has some overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.
• Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK. We'll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to any of our physical office locations.
• International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis.
• 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.
• Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences (on average 1-2 per year), with additional travel for those interested in traveling more. Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend whole-org and department retreats 3 times per year to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and we’ll accommodate staff who have conflicting family or other obligations.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date.

Miscellaneous details:

• Please apply to only one Senior Researcher posting. If you have deep expertise in this area, this pod-specific role is the right fit. If not, there's no need to apply here — our generalist Senior Researcher role is designed for strong researchers who don't have a single specialization, and you don't need to apply to both. Applying to the generalist role won't put you at any disadvantage!
• Please note that our hiring process consists of the same work trials for the following roles: Researcher, Senior Researcher, Senior Cross-Cutting Researcher, Senior Livelihoods Researcher, Senior Malaria Researcher, Senior New Areas Researcher, Senior Nutrition Researcher, Senior Vaccines Researcher, and Senior Water Researcher. If, within the last year, you applied and were rejected for one of these roles, you should hold off on applying to the other roles, unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our team. If you're interested in all of these roles, please just apply once and note in your application that you'd like to be considered for the other roles, too.
• After application review, our hiring process consists of a short application exercise and up to 15 hours of compensated work trials. You can see more details about our hiring process on our FAQs page.
• We devote significant staff capacity to initial application review, and we respond to all applications as quickly as possible.
• We have a strong preference for full-time applicants, but we’ll consider applications for part-time work. We aren’t interested in reviewing applications for contract or project-based work at this time.
• If we settle on an application deadline, we’ll write it in bold here. If you’re on our website job posting and don’t see a deadline, there is no deadline. If you’re reading this on an external job board and don’t see a deadline, you should double-check on our website.
• You don't need to submit a cover letter—we rely mainly on your resume and answers to the application questions below when we're making early decisions.

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