Global Health & Development Researcher and Grantmaker

About Us

At Founders Pledge, our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to do immense good with their charitable giving. Since launching in 2015, our community of over 2,300 members has pledged nearly $13.6B and donated $1.9B+ to the charitable sector in 45+ countries.

We provide end-to-end giving infrastructure, pioneering research, and access to a global network of experts. In other words, we help tech leaders become strategic philanthropists. Our members include founders and leaders behind companies such as Airbnb, UiPath, Dropbox, Skype, Spotify, and Uber.

We focus on deploying capital where it can achieve the greatest impact, guided by evidence, careful analysis, and long-term thinking.

We're open to candidates of varying seniority for this role. Our salary bands are as follows:

Junior level - $80k /£50k
Applied level - $95/£65-75k
Senior level - $120K/£90k

We’re looking for a Grantmaker to work on our Research team, which identifies and evaluates high-impact funding opportunities (HIFOs) to enable our broader member base to give as effectively as possible. Our member base consists of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) who use our HIFO recommendations to guide their giving.

This is an unusually impactful role for the right person: our team has moved more than $200 million to highly cost-effective opportunities in global health, climate, and education over the past three years. Reporting to our GHD Lead, you’ll research new potential interventions and investigate potential funding opportunities. You’ll also be responsible for writing up these opportunities and presenting information about them to donors in a transparent, honest, and compelling way.

In this role, you will dedicate a large portion of your time to investigating specific funding margins: organizations and programs that can cost-effectively save and improve lives around the world but especially in the world’s poorest countries. Our grantmaking cadence is rapid: you’ll be expected to conduct rigorous evaluations and make multimillion-dollar grant recommendations on a monthly basis. At the same time, we’ll be hoping you’ll expand the set of interventions we consider and, in particular, uncover novel interventions that may require active grantmaking to launch in the world.

You’ll have the opportunity to fund not just direct interventions but also research, and you’ll be able to fund not just rigorously backed “micro-interventions” but also high-risk, high-reward “big bets.”

It’s a big job, but we believe the right candidate will thrive and have enormous impact on the world.

• Undertaking research investigations to answer key questions and working on literature reviews
• Funding opportunity investigations:
  Individual investigations into promising funding opportunities to see if they meet our bar for recommendation, contributing to reports or other internal or external materials.
• Working with internal and external stakeholders to get these opportunities funded. Though you won’t be expected to wear a “stewardship hat,” you will need to interact with UHNW donors as the expert in the room, answering thorough and detailed questions about your research.

We’re looking for someone with excellent analytical skills, domain knowledge, generalist appetite, and an interest in impact maximisation.

• Relevant expertise: You have domain expertise in a topic relevant to the role, including development economics, public health, or cost-effectiveness analysis. Those with transferable skills from other fields are also strong candidates: past successful researchers have had backgrounds in medicine, finance, and the hard sciences.
• Excellent analytical skills: Comfort expressing views…