Senior Technology & IT Specialist

GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work 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 nearly $400 million in 2024.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Technology & IT Specialist to make sure our team at GiveWell has the best possible experience with our tech tools. You’ll help ensure our internal systems boost productivity while staying secure and running smoothly. You’ll join our Technology team, report to our Head of Technology, and play a key role in building up our tech support.

Why is GiveWell hiring for this position now?

GiveWell’s distributed, hybrid workforce relies heavily on technology to collaborate effectively and maximize our impact. A recent departure from our team has created a vacancy in our Technology Support and Enablement function. We’re using this opportunity to evolve the role beyond its previous scope. We’re looking for someone who can step into critical system administration responsibilities while expanding the capacity and capabilities of the team. This role is essential to maintaining the productivity of our growing organization as we continue to scale our life-saving work.

You’ll do the following types of activities in this role:

• Own our core productivity systems. You’ll serve as the primary administrator for Google Workspace, Asana, Slack, and other critical tools that our entire organization depends on daily. This includes user management, security configurations, troubleshooting complex issues, and ensuring optimal uptime for systems that directly impact our ability to save lives through our research and grantmaking.
• Manage technology deployments and hardware lifecycle. You’ll oversee deployment of new hire and replacement laptops. Our laptops are majority macOS, with about 25% Windows PCs. You will ensure new team members have properly configured workstations from day one. This includes coordinating with our managed service provider, executing on urgent deployments and replacements, maintaining our hardware inventory, and troubleshooting hardware issues as they arise.
• Lead technology projects that improve organizational effectiveness. You’ll scope, plan, and execute projects like tool rollouts, workflow optimizations, upgrades and migrations. Recent examples include implementing advanced Google Workspace features, deploying AI tools or introducing SSO. You’ll gather requirements from teams across the organization and translate them into technical solutions.
• Manage our technology support ecosystem. You’ll supervise our managed service provider relationships, ensuring quality delivery and continuous improvement. While our MSP handles most day-to-day support requests and hardware configurations, you’ll serve as the escalation point for urgent issues and requests that require specialized knowledge or organizational context.
• Drive user experience and training initiatives. You’ll design and deliver training programs that help our team members maximize productivity with our technology tools. This includes creating documentation, running workshops, and providing consultative support to help teams optimize their workflows. Your work directly enables our Research, Outreach and Operations staff to focus on impact rather than troubleshooting technology.
• Model cybersecurity and compliance best practices. You’ll use your existing knowledge of security best practices to implement those across the technologies you manage and monitor for threats. You will also model data stewardship to the rest of the organization in how you work, making sure that data and security issues do not interfere with our overall mission.
• Support strategic technology planning. As a key member of our Technology team, you’ll contribute to technology roadmap planning and help evaluate new tools and approaches. You’ll bring user perspective and operational insight to strategic decisions about our technology investments.

About You

The strongest candidates will bring 5+ years of experience in technology support, systems administration, or IT operations, with demonstrated project management abilities. Candidates should also have demonstrated evidence of strong cultural competence and end-user empathy. In addition to the right experience, we’ll be looking for someone with the following characteristics:

• You own your work. You’ve independently led technology projects from start to finish. You know when to loop in stakeholders and how to keep projects moving forward despite competing priorities and changing requirements.
• You communicate exceptionally well and know your audience. You can explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences in ways that are compelling and actionable. You’re comfortable facilitating meetings, creating training materials, and providing both verbal and written updates to leadership.
• You’re a proactive partner who is service-oriented. You anticipate needs before they become problems and go above and beyond to provide thoughtful, personalized support to team members. You partner with team members across the org to help them find the right solutions for their needs. You take genuine satisfaction in helping others succeed with technology and treat each support interaction as an opportunity to improve someone’s work experience.
• You’re exceptionally thorough and organized. You follow through on commitments, document your work systematically, and maintain attention to detail even when juggling multiple priorities. You create processes and systems that ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
• You have strong technical troubleshooting skills. You approach problems systematically, can interpret technical logs and error messages, and know when to escalate versus when to dive deeper. You’re comfortable with both routine administration and complex problem-solving.
• You’re user-focused and empathetic. You understand that technology should enable people to do their best work, not create barriers. When engaging with teammates you keep focus on how solutions will deliver value in a way that matters to them. You listen carefully to user feedback and can balance technical constraints with user needs to find optimal solutions.
• You’re aligned with GiveWell’s mission and values. You’re passionate about GiveWell’s work and impact, and you personally resonate with our values. You understand that reliable technology infrastructure is essential to saving lives through cost-effective giving.
• You’re committed to continuous learning and staying current with technology trends, security best practices, and emerging tools that could benefit the organization.

Key Questions & Information

We expect you might want to know the answers to the following questions before you apply.

What technology will I be working with?

Our core stack includes Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Calendar), Asana for project management, Slack for internal communication, Zoom for external meetings, Claude and ChatGPT for AI, and various specialized tools for different teams. You’ll also work with security tools, hardware management systems, and integration platforms. We’re a cloud-first organization with a strong preference for SaaS solutions. 

We also use Salesforce for Donor and Grant management, and have a team dedicated to supporting that platform, so supporting Salesforce will not be an appreciable part of this role. 

What’s the management trajectory of this role?

You’ll start as an individual contributor but you’ll be responsible for the work of our MSP. While this role is not currently slated for management, there will be opportunities to lead projects, mentor junior staff and contribute strategically. 

How does this role interact with other teams?

You’ll work closely with every team at GiveWell since everyone relies on the systems you manage. You’ll be a key partner to teams across the organization and leadership. You’ll also collaborate closely with our Head of Technology on broader technology strategy.

What does project work look like in this role?

Recent technology projects have included standardizing laptop deployment, streamlining onboarding processes, and introducing AI tools to improve productivity. Projects typically run 4-12 weeks and involve stakeholder engagement, technical research, implementation planning, testing, rollout, and training. However because of the small size of our team, project work has to be balanced with meeting immediate support needs. You’ll typically dedicate 70% of your time to ongoing system administration and support, with 30% focused on strategic projects and improvements. 

What are some reasons this role might not be a strong fit?

This role requires someone who enjoys both hands-on technical work and people-focused activities like training and support. If you prefer to focus exclusively on either technical depth or strategic work, this hybrid role might not be ideal. Additionally, if you’re looking for a role focused on software development or cutting-edge technology rather than productivity tools and user experience, this position would likely not be satisfying.

How does remote work function for this role?

Most of your work can be done effectively from anywhere, and the majority of our team works remotely. This role requires active work during the North American business day, with some flexibility within that range. You’ll occasionally need to coordinate hardware deployments, and troubleshoot physical office systems in a variety of timezones, most commonly for our Oakland, Brooklyn, or London locations. This role should also be prepared to attend in-person team events which occur approximately quarterly. We’ll cover all travel expenses for required activities.

What is the hiring process like?

Our basic plan for the hiring process is listed below. If you move to step 2, you’ll be in touch with a member of our recruiting team who will quickly answer any questions about logistics and timelines. 

1. Submit your application below. You don’t need to write a cover letter—we deliberately turned off the cover letter upload field; we only need you to answer our application questions.
2. 30-minute introductory conversation with our Talent Acquisition Team
3. Take Home Assessment
4. 60-minute interview with Head of Technology
5. 75-minute Values Interview
6. 90-minute final interview with Head of Technology
7. Reference checks
8. Offer

Please note that we could choose not to move forward at any stage of the process described above, and we do not share individualized evaluative feedback with applicants.

We plan to devote substantial time to reviewing applications, and we will respond to everyone who applies. We’ll review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s better to apply sooner. If we decide to close the application by a specific deadline, we’ll update this page at least one week in advance.

Details

• Team: You’ll report to our Head of Technology. 
• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $130,200
• All other U.S. locations: $118,100
• Location: You must be based in the United States and can choose to work remotely, hybrid or in person at one of our offices located in Brooklyn, NY or Oakland, CA.
• 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.
• 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
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Travel: You’ll be expected to attend two whole-organization Visit Weeks in Oakland, one week-long Operations team retreat somewhere in the US and occasional Technology team events. We’ll fully cover your travel expenses for required travel events, including childcare if you need it. 

About GiveWell

GiveWell is dedicated to finding and funding outstanding giving opportunities in global health and development, sharing the full details of our analysis with everyone for free. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify. 

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.6 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we’ve directed 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, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.

GiveWell grants have:

• Helped governments to implement high-impact health programs, like in-line chlorination of drinking water in India and HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
• Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.  
• Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator and Evidence Action’s Accelerator 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 provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
• Tested our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.

We never take for granted that GiveWell’s work is good for the world. 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 and external analysis to address our uncertainties and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.

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 careers@givewell.org. 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.