Senior Communications Officer, Editorial & Production

GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.

We’re hiring a Senior Communications Officer, Editorial & Production to lead the editorial quality and production of GiveWell’s communications. You will set the editorial bar, build the people and systems needed to produce excellent work consistently and at increasing scale, and personally shape some of our most complex and consequential content.

This role will lead a small and growing team. This is one of three new communications leadership roles, alongside a Senior Communications Officer, Strategic Communications and a Senior Communications Officer, Media & Public Affairs.

About the role

Both our research and impact are expanding. Last year, we directed more than $400 million to highly cost-effective programs that save and improve lives. This year, we expect our grantmaking to approach, and possibly exceed, $1 billion.

To build toward the communications capacity this next stage requires, we are rapidly expanding our team. The three Senior Communications Officers will work together on many projects to support GiveWell’s communications needs, while working closely with other leaders across our organization. Each leader will own their function, but much of the work that matters most—like team strategies, major initiatives, partnership campaigns, and how we present the organization as a whole—will involve all three. We will expect this group to set shared priorities and work closely together to achieve the team’s goals.

In this hands-on leadership position, you’ll own the editorial quality and production of GiveWell’s communications, with end-to-end responsibility for this emerging function. You’ll strengthen its standards, hire and develop its people, build its systems, and personally own its hardest and most consequential work. This is an opportunity to build, not just inherit, an important function at a critical point in GiveWell’s development. You’ll start with a small team and grow it over time.

While this role is set at the Senior Communications Officer level, we may consider hiring an exceptional candidate as a Communications Director—with greater expectations, responsibilities, and compensation.

What You'll Do

As Senior Communications Officer, Editorial & Production, you will be responsible not only for the quality of individual pieces but also for creating a content operation that can prioritize effectively, manage dependencies, use its resources well, and deliver reliably. This will require both senior editorial judgment and strong operational leadership.

Specific duties will include:

• 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.

About You

You are skilled at using communications to help people understand complex ideas, build trust, and take action. You are comfortable being accountable for outcomes, making consequential decisions with limited oversight, and knowing which decisions genuinely require escalation.

You are energized by intellectually demanding work, and the challenges of creating engaging communications within a careful and precise style. You can engage deeply with GiveWell’s research, and you are comfortable understanding and communicating about data in detail. You have a long track record of getting up to speed quickly on complex subject matter and carefully communicating to a very high standard. You can build a compelling narrative that is entirely factual, representing what is known and unknown without overstating or hedging into vagueness—and you find the idea of working with GiveWell’s exacting communications standards exciting rather than limiting.

Your background includes significant experience leading communications in complex, high-stakes environments. This should include 10+ years of experience leading editorial and content-production work, setting and maintaining editorial standards, managing writers and editors, and building systems that produce consistently high-quality work. You have deep experience owning that work end to end, not just contributing to it. You’ve remained a hands-on leader who enjoys the work itself, as well as the strategy and systems behind it.

You are a precise editor of complex or technical content: you read text literally and carefully, and you notice when a claim isn’t supported by the evidence behind it. You should be able to combine high standards for individual work with the operational judgment needed to prioritize, allocate resources, manage complex production, and increase capacity over time. You should understand how content is developed through writing, editing, design, audio, graphics, websites, and other formats—even if you are not personally an expert in every medium.

In addition to demonstrated expertise in the duties listed above, you should have:

• 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.

Key Questions & Information

What are some of the reasons I might not like this role?

• 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 CEO and executive 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.

Can I apply to more than one of the Senior Communications Officer roles?

You can, but most people shouldn’t. We’re looking for deep expertise in these areas, and we expect most candidates with required expertise will be a clear fit for a single role. If you’re one of the few with real depth in more than one area, apply to both and tell us why. Otherwise, apply for the role you are most qualified for, and we’ll let you know if we think another role might suit you better.

What does this interview process entail?

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 will likely include the following:

• Application
• Interview with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team
• Compensated work trial with a set maximum number of hours
• Interview with GiveWell's Chief of Staff to the CEO
• Values interview
• 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.

Details

• Team: You’ll report to our Head of Communications, collaborate closely with the two other Senior Communications Officers, and lead a small team that you’ll develop over time.
• Compensation: 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
• Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely.
• Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK. Please note that office space is limited, and is not guaranteed.
• International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis via our EOR. Note that there are some countries in which our EOR does not operate, which we cannot override, and we are unable to sponsor visas abroad. 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.
• 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: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.
• Benefits: A few highlights of our benefits offerings:
  • 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 an annual summer break
  • 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
  • Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
  • Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for U.S. based staff)
• 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.

About GiveWell

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.

Additional information

We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.

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. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at View email address on aiapply.co. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell's Privacy Statement for Applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell's Work Trial Policy.