Josh Rosenberg writes:
GiveWell (www.givewell.org) is a nonprofit that does in-depth research to direct funds to outstanding organizations helping the global poor. In 2018, we directed more than $140 million to our recommendations.
We are recruiting researchers at varying levels of seniority to identify the giving opportunities which can most cost-effectively improve the lives of the global poor.
We think that readers of this blog could be an especially good fit—we aim to take a critical approach to reviewing research that is strongly influenced by Bayesian methods.
We are especially interested in applicants with experience in economics, statistics, political science, and other quantitative fields.
More information is available at our job posting here: https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs/research-positions. To learn more about what it’s like to work at GiveWell, see our recent blog post here: https://blog.givewell.org/2019/03/07/what-is-it-like-to-work-at-givewell/
If you have any questions, please email us directly at [email protected].
interesting — from the second link it sounds like they plan to have doubled their total research staff in the next ~2y, so it’s likely that similar opportunities will arise in the future. It’s good they’re explicitly looking for employees versed in a more principled Bayesian approach (I’ve complained about the broader community’s lack of methodological engagement elsewhere — though I do generally like their work and have directed some of my donation budget to their recommended charities for a decade-ish now).
Supposedly the competition for their and related positions can be quite rough (e.g. see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmbP9rwXncfa32seH), but probably not any more brutal than in broader academia. Might consider applying myself after graduation, depending on where I end up :]
(peeking at their preliminary questions, they seem simple & straightforward enough, though presumably their ~10 hour work assignment is substantially more rigorous. And I do always wonder what “a relevant advanced degree, such as a Ph.D. in economics” — I remember attending a presentation by some computational stats googlers and they said something similar — “we hire PhDs from a wide range of disciplines! From computer science departments, mathematics departments, computer engineering departments, statistics departments — we’ve *even* hired a few physicists!”)