Research Fellow and Strategy Fellow on the Cause Prioritization Team

Coefficient Giving is scaling its giving significantly over the next few years. To support that growth, we're looking to hire Research Fellows and Strategy Fellows to join our Cause Prioritization team, focused on global health and wellbeing. We’re planning to make at least three hires from this application cycle.

The Cause Prioritization team is the intellectual backbone of Coefficient Giving's Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW) team. Your job will be to help us prioritize and launch new $100 million+ funds, design the systems we use to evaluate our impact, and conduct research to inform our grantmaking approach. Past work by the team has led us to launch programs on lead exposure, air quality, global health R&D, global aid policy, economic growth, and effective giving and careers.

About Coefficient Giving

Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) is a philanthropic funder and advisor. Since 2014, we’ve directed over $5 billion in grants as part of our mission to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. In 2025, we directed over $1 billion to high-impact causes, and we continue to rapidly scale. We work with a range of donors who share our commitment to cost-effective, high-impact giving. Our current funds include Science and Global Health R&D, Navigating Transformative Artificial Intelligence, Abundance & Growth, Farm Animal Welfare, Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness, and more.

We’re proud of our track record. Our grants to evidence-backed global health programs have saved over 100,000 lives. We supported the late-stage clinical trials for the R21 malaria vaccine, now being scaled to protect millions of kids globally. And our work in policy advocacy helped catalyze major wins on housing reform, including City of Yes in New York and SB 79 in California, which will enable thousands of new housing units.

About the Cause Prioritization Team

The GHW team makes grants across scientific research, policy advocacy, and global health and development to serve our mission of helping others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We prioritize grants with the potential to improve health outcomes and economic wellbeing, with most of our work focused on people living in low- and middle-income countries.

Within GHW, the Cause Prioritization team works closely with senior leadership and program staff to conduct research that improves our grantmaking and high-level strategy. Its primary focus is recommending new funds to launch and allocating funding between GHW programs.

What you’ll do

The Cause Prioritization team is organized around three sub-teams:

• New Programs identifies promising new programs and funds for us to launch. We aim to launch at least one program a year capable of cost-effectively allocating over $100 million in its first few years of grantmaking.

• Incubation makes exploratory grants to advance our learning agenda in potentially promising areas where we still have open questions. Current focus areas include education in low- and middle-income countries and applying AI tools to improve health and wellbeing.

• Internal Evaluation informs how Coefficient Giving allocates its budget between funds and holds us accountable by rigorously assessing our impact. This sub-team also refines our cost-effectiveness methodology and draws general lessons from our grantmaking.

Most team members spend the majority of their time focused on the goals of their sub-team. However, we are a small team (currently eight people) and prioritize flexibility, meaning team members collaborate across workstreams when it best serves our mission. We expect to hire at least one role across each of these sub-teams, and are looking for versatile generalists who are excited to work on a broad range of activities and cause areas.

All roles on the team involve:

• Conducting desk research to assess potential cause areas, evaluate programs, and inform strategy.

• Building back-of-the-envelope models to estimate the social returns and cost-effectiveness of potential grants.

• Interviewing domain experts and working with potential grantees to answer key questions.

• Synthesizing conclusions and recommendations in writing for senior leadership.

Depending on the role, you may also:

• Investigate and recommend specific grants. The team currently has a $20 million exploratory grantmaking budget, with the ability to bid for more if we find sufficiently strong opportunities.

• Develop and maintain methodological guidance for cost-effectiveness analysis across GHW.

• Assess program impact through case studies and evaluation of forward-looking strategies.

• Rigorously evaluate and synthesize academic evidence relevant to our grantmaking.

• Support program teams with answering research questions that could shape their strategies.

Past work by Research and Strategy Fellows includes preliminary assessments into potential new cause areas like telecommunications in LMICs and civil conflict reduction, more in-depth research leading to the launch of our most recent GHW cause areas in global public health policy and economic growth in low- and middle-income countries, and running the $150 million Regranting Challenge.

Research vs. Strategy Fellows

We're hiring for both Research Fellow and Strategy Fellow roles. The distinction is one of emphasis rather than a hard boundary, and both will be evaluated through the same process.

Research Fellows typically have a master's or PhD in a quantitative discipline related to social science or public health, and tend to focus more on in-depth evidence reviews and academic literature synthesis. Strategy Fellows typically have a background in consulting, policy, or global health implementation, and tend to focus on grantmaking and faster, more assumptions-driven analysis.

We use both titles to help make the role legible to people from different professional backgrounds. Your title won't determine your responsibilities.

Who we’re looking for

We're looking for people with at least three years of relevant professional experience (or the equivalent in academia) who are excited to pragmatically apply research and analysis to high-stakes decisions.

We're open to a wide range of experience levels. Some of our best hires have come in with three or four years of experience; others have had over a decade. We care more about the quality of your thinking and your aptitude for the responsibilities described above than the number of years you have worked. There is room to grow with strong performance — multiple members of Coefficient Giving’s current leadership team came up through this team.

We expect all our staff to put our mission first to help us realize our ambitious goals for impact, and to model our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness.

You may be a great fit for this role if you have:

• Strong quantitative ability. You are comfortable performing back-of-the-envelope calculations in domains with sparse data, e.g. estimating the social returns and cost-effectiveness of potential grants.

• Pragmatism. You are able to make and justify reasonable estimates with limited data and come to concrete conclusions. You prioritize the most important questions to inform a decision rather than trying to answer everything.

• Strong written communication and reasoning transparency. You are able to communicate your thinking clearly and concisely and explain what you believe and why, including why you chose to weigh particular evidence over other evidence and where you’re uncertain.

• Strong listening ability and epistemic judgment. You are comfortable interviewing academics, policymakers, and practitioners in areas where you are not the expert, engaging with curiosity, asking the right questions, and updating your conclusions with new information.

• Comfort with tradeoffs. You are comfortable with opportunity cost and engaging in prioritization.

• Flexibility. You are willing and able to work across a range of topics and do the work that's most important.

We're particularly interested in candidates with the following backgrounds, though many others may be a good fit: policy research, strategy consulting, or other roles applying analysis to practical decision-making; academia, particularly social science or public health; and experience in international development, particularly in more analytical roles.

The ideal candidate will possess many of the skills and experiences described above, but there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. If you are on the fence about whether you are qualified, we strongly encourage you to apply.

Role Details & Benefits

• Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $177,675, which would be distributed as a base salary of $154,500 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $23,175.

  • There would be a 10% upward adjustment for candidates based in SF or D.C. and a 5% upward adjustment for candidates based in NYC, provided you co-work from our offices an average of two days per week.

• Time zones and location: We offer remote work in many countries, and we are open to hires outside the U.S. The current cause prioritization team is split between the U.S. and Europe, and we expect candidates to be open to the occasional flexible call.

  • We are happy to consider sponsoring U.S. work authorization. However, we don’t control who is and isn’t eligible for a visa and can’t guarantee visa approval.

• Benefits: Our benefits package includes:

  • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the U.S. for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.

  • Dental, vision, and life insurance for you and your family.

  • Four weeks of PTO recommended per year.

  • Four months of fully paid family leave.

  • A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive. This policy also includes a productivity benefit, which provides a set amount for staff to expense items that enhance their productivity.

  • A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered.

  • Support for remote work — we’ll cover a remote workspace outside your home if you need one, or connect you with a Coefficient Giving coworking hub in your city. We currently have offices in San Francisco and Washington D.C., and multiple staff working from several other cities in the U.S. and elsewhere.

  • We can’t always provide every benefit we offer U.S. staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country).

• Start date: Ideally, we’d like new hires to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we can be flexible for exceptional candidates.

We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@coefficientgiving.org.

The deadline for this application is Sunday, May 10, 2026, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Research staff are typically employed by Coefficient Giving’s 501(c)(3), and as such are likely eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.

We may use AI to assist in the initial screening of applications, including to detect whether candidates have used AI models in drafting their application. Decisions are always made by a human on our team. If you have any questions about our use of AI tools, you can email jobs@coefficientgiving.org.