Head of Legal

The posting

The Role

GiveWell’s prior General Counsel recently transitioned to the role of Chief Operations Officer, and we are now looking for an experienced, pragmatic attorney to lead GiveWell’s legal function and build a team that can scale with our expected growth. This role will report to the COO and will be a strategic senior leader and thought partner, helping to shape the growing Operations team as well as GiveWell more broadly. Along with owning GiveWell’s legal portfolio and strategy, the Head of Legal will also support and manage our high-performing Grants Administration function.

We are open to candidates at various levels of experience, including candidates who have had multiple turns as General Counsel as well as candidates who would be stepping into the most-senior in-house role for the first time. Candidates will default into the “Head of Legal” role, which is a Senior Director-level position. However, those candidates who have significant prior GC experience, especially in grantmaking or operating nonprofits, may be considered for hire at the Vice President level.

In this role, you will:

• Build and lead GiveWell’s legal function and serve as the organization’s primary legal decision-maker, developing a calibrated legal strategy as GiveWell continues to scale. This is a visible and highly cross-functional role within the organization and will work closely with senior Ops leaders, GiveWell’s executive leadership team, and the Board.
• Maintain and improve GiveWell’s strong compliance posture as a nonprofit that receives donations, makes grants, and operates in multiple jurisdictions. This includes risk assessment and mitigation across employment law, data privacy and security, programs and staff travel, IP, contract management, and other areas.
• Provide strategic leadership and management for GiveWell's Grants Admin function, including guidance on complex or novel grant structures as they arise.
• Own contracting across all of GiveWell’s functional areas (grants, contributions, employment, software, independent contractors and vendors, etc.) and build the systems, processes, and controls needed to help the organization operate efficiently.
• Modernize how GiveWell's legal administration work gets done, prioritizing technology and tools that increase capacity and reduce reliance on manual review.

As a senior leader within the Operations organization, you'll act as a thought partner to the COO and other leaders, helping shape how the growing organization operates and scales. You’ll partner with Research, Outreach, Finance, People, and Tech to make sure legal considerations are built into major decisions, and that the results are calibrated and effective for GiveWell’s needs. You'll respond to internal legal questions promptly with clear, actionable guidance grounded in GiveWell’s goals and values, and help staff across the organization understand when and how to bring in legal support.

About You

We’re looking for someone who brings deep legal expertise and sound judgment, with the pragmatism to know when something requires extreme care and when to keep things simple and fast-moving. Our ideal candidate has the capability to build a legal function from the ground up, can lead through growth and change, enjoys building teams and systems, and wants to stay close to substantive legal work rather than operate purely at a policy or executive level.

The strongest candidates will bring:

• 10+ years of legal experience, including significant in-house experience; prior experience as a General Counsel or similar senior legal leadership experience is a plus
• Active state bar membership in good standing, preferably in California or New York
• Excellent people management skills, including experience building, leading, and coaching legal and other professional teams
• Expertise in legal and compliance areas relevant to GiveWell’s work – this portfolio includes nonprofit and tax-exempt law, data privacy, contract negotiation, international corporate governance & expansion, and employment
• Prior success leading complex legal or compliance projects where results depended on cross-functional stakeholder engagement
• Strong communication skills, particularly in translating complex legal issues into clear, actionable guidance for non-legal colleagues and leadership, and explaining the intricacies of legal risk to a sophisticated, skeptical audience
• Sound judgment and experience in calibrating legal guidance to the practical stakes involved, preferably within multiple different environments

While not required, these attributes are also preferred:

• Experience in philanthropy, global health, or international development
• Experience managing or partnering closely with adjacent functions, such as grants administration, HR, or partnerships
• Experience with international legal and regulatory environments (e.g., UK operations or establishment of corporate subsidiaries abroad)
• Experience and comfort with legal technology and self-service/automation tools that increase team efficiency
• Experience working with or advising nonprofit boards

We also think these qualities will help you do well in the role and at GiveWell:

• Value alignment. GiveWell’s values and mission are personally energizing to you. You have a connection and commitment to GiveWell’s impact and the methods we use to achieve it.
• People oriented. You love building teams and people up to their fullest potential.
• Adaptability. You know how to grow with an organization and can tailor your approach to unique circumstances. You can flex your analysis and communication style to the specific client and their needs.
• Humility. You care about “getting it right” way more than being right. You welcome and encourage feedback from any direction.

Key Questions

What does this candidate process entail?

We’ll use a combination of written responses, interviews, and a candidate exercise 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 is:

• We’ll review your resume, application question responses, and other information you provide
• You will have a call with member of our Talent Acquisition team
• Qualified candidates will be invited to complete the candidate exercise. This is a written work trial with a 6-hour time limit. (We offer an honorarium to compensate for the time you spend completing this exercise.)
• A hiring manager interview with the COO
• A set of interviews with other key team members
• Reference calls
• A final interview (potentially on-site, in Oakland) with the COO and CEO

Note that you don’t need to submit a cover letter. We rely heavily on your resume and answers to the application questions below to make our initial decisions. We encourage you to spend time responding to the application questions authentically and carefully, and not to rely on LLM tools to generate responses for you. We do read all submissions, and our team can generally recognize AI-generated text.

What is a candidate exercise? What should I expect?

Across all roles at GiveWell, we find written candidate exercises to be one of the best ways to assess whether someone is likely to be successful in the position. Candidate exercises are role-specific and are designed to mimic the type of work you will be asked to perform in the role. They provide a window into how you think and communicate, and whether you may be a fit for the role within our specific organization. They also give you, as a candidate, an opportunity to try out an example of work you might do if hired, and that can help you determine if this is a role you want to pursue.

For this Head of Legal role, the candidate exercise will be completed very early in the screening process. It will then be a point of reference for future interviews, and will help inform and structure some of those later conversations.

Because we understand your time is valuable, we are providing the option to receive an honorarium for completing and submitting the exercise. More information will be provided to you if you reach that stage of the application process.

Why do you ask for references before the final interview?

Many organizations use references as a check-the-box exercise that comes after the hiring decision has been made, but we feel that references should play a substantive role in the selection process. Moving them earlier gives us an opportunity to incorporate what we learn in our finalist selection process. We can then address any updates or concerns with you openly and straightforwardly in the final hiring manager interview.

What are some reasons I might not like this role?

• It’s a dealbreaker for you to report to the COO instead of the CEO from day one.
• You prefer to join an existing legal team, and don’t want to build one from scratch.
• You prefer not to work as a people manager. Or, you would be fine managing lawyers but do not want to have management responsibility over a non-legal function, like Grants Admin.
• You prefer highly structured environments, or functions where the processes are already laid out for you.
• You are not interested in experimenting with or using advances in technology, including AI tools, to streamline the legal function.
• You struggle with receiving straightforward feedback, such as on your written work. Or you find it hard to deliver clear, candid feedback to peers, direct reports, or your manager.

Details

Team: You’ll report to GiveWell’s COO, Sai Jahann, and manage the Manager, Grants Admin. You’ll be empowered to design and build a legal function that makes sense for GiveWell’s scale of operations and ambition.

Compensation: We share upfront information about our compensation for every role. We set compensation based on internal leveling and external benchmarking, and we typically do not negotiate compensation at the offer stage. For the Head of Legal position (Sr. Director, Legal):

• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $374,000
• All other U.S. locations: $340,000

Location: GiveWell staff primarily work remotely within the United States. GiveWell has offices in Oakland, California, and Brooklyn, New York, which you are welcome but not required to work from. Please note that we may give some preference to candidates who are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and/or who are willing to commute or travel to Oakland for ad-hoc visits 3 to 6 times per year. We are only considering US-based applicants for this role.

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
• One week all-office closure
• 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 US-based staff)

You can see our full list of benefits here.

Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.

Travel: Every year, we host two Visit Week gatherings in our Oakland office, bringing together the entire GiveWell team. We also hold an annual retreat for our Operations department. We’ll expect you to attend each of those three gatherings, although we’ll offer some flexibility in the event of major conflicts or emergencies.

Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.

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 [email protected]. 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.