Staff Accountant at GiveWell

United States

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 more than $400 million in 2025. The Role We’re looking for a Staff Accountant to support the transactional and operational accounting that keeps GiveWell’s books accurate and current. You’ll bring care and precision to accounts payable, month-end close, and reconciliations—work that directly enables GiveWell to move money carefully and transparently. This is a great entry-to-mid-level opportunity for someone detail-oriented who wants broad exposure to nonprofit accounting operations. You’ll be joining our growing Finance team and reporting directly to our Controller. Why we’re hiring this role right now: GiveWell has grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025, and we’re building our finance team to match that scale and prepare for additional growth in the coming years. Our Controller joined earlier this year, and we’re now making the team’s foundational hires to shift from outside contractors to a strong in-house finance team. Specific duties include: Owning accounts payable and employee expense processes. You’ll manage invoice processing, vendor relationships, credit card program administration, and employee expense reimbursements, ensuring accurate coding and compliance with our expense policies. Supporting month-end and quarterly close. You’ll help record journal entries for payroll, benefits, credit card and employee expenses, prepaids, and accruals. Performing and improving our monthly bank reconciliation process. You’ll own the execution of this process and look for ways to make it more efficient over time. Triaging and responding to finance-related staff questions. You’ll intake questions and concerns from GiveWell staff and be the first point of contact on the Finance team to triage and respond to those communications. Supporting annual compliance processes. You’ll contribute to the audit and 990 preparation alongside the Controller and Senior Accountant. About You The strongest candidates will have 2+ years of experience in accounting, accounts payable, or a related finance role, with a track record of accuracy and reliability in transactional and operational accounting work. You have a solid foundational understanding of debits, credits, and how the books work, and you take pride in getting the details right. We expect that high-quality candidates will have all of the characteristics listed below: 2+ years of financial/accounting experience Experience with: Common accounting systems (we currently use Sage Intacct, Salesforce, and Bill.com) Supporting financial audits and annual compliance processes such as the 990 Accounts payable processes, including invoice processing, vendor management, and expense reimbursements Strong Excel skills. You’re comfortable with formulas, filters, and pivot tables, and you use them to keep your work accurate and organized Highly organized. You’re meticulous in how you prepare, document, and track your work. You love a close checklist and clear documented procedures for each workstream Keen detail orientation. You bring accuracy and care to your work Strong communication. You write and speak with accuracy and the right tone Experience with or interest in process improvement. You don’t just execute, you look for ways to do things better We also think these preferred characteristics will help you do well in the role at GiveWell: Alignment with our values and passion about GiveWell’s mission Experience in public accounting (Big 4 or similar) Comfortable working cross-functionally with non-finance colleagues and communicating clearly with internal stakeholders Details Compensation: NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $113,000 All other U.S. locations: $102,500 International: Similar to the “all other U.S. locations” salary, based on historical exchange rates and delivered in locally denominated currency Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the US and abroad. This position is eligible to work fully remotely. Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California or Brooklyn, NYC. We’ll cover relocation expenses for candidates who wish to move to either of these physical office locations. International work: Although we strongly prefer US-based candidates for this role, we are open to exceptional candidates in Canada or the United Kingdom on a case-by-case basis. A successful candidate will need to commit to a work schedule that has some overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers. 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. Visa sponsorship: If you are already working in the United States on a work visa and wish to remain in the US, we’ll do our best to sponsor it. For this role, we can currently only hire team members based in the UK, Canada, or the United States who have prior work authorization. Please note that government entities and policies ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas. Benefits: A few highlights of our benefits offerings: 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 plus an annual summer break 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships 403(b) retirement plan for US team members Automatic contribution equal to 5% of your gross salary into your 403(b) retirement plan (for US based staff) Travel: GiveWell hosts “Visit Weeks” twice a year in our Oakland, California, office and up to two annual departmental retreats. Attending these in-person opportunities will be important to fulfilling the goals of this role. Occasional additional travel may be helpful for conferences or recruiting events. Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date. Key Questions We expect you may want to know the answers to the following questions before you apply: What is the Finance team like at GiveWell? We approach accounting as more than keeping the books. It’s how GiveWell demonstrates the integrity and transparency that our donors and grantees rely on. We are at an exciting and important moment: building out the processes and systems that will allow our finance function to operate with accuracy and efficiency at scale. You’ll not only execute core accounting work with care and attention to detail, but also help us envision and build a better function, identifying where we can streamline, improve, and do things smarter as we grow. You’ll own meaningful work from day one, contributing to close processes, accounts payable, audit preparation, and more, all in service of an organization that moves large amounts of money carefully and transparently. This role is cross-functional by nature: you’ll need to communicate clearly with non-finance colleagues, navigate a growing and evolving organization, and look for ways to improve those processes and relationships as we build out the function. Our Finance team is currently small but growing. We’re hiring a Senior Accountant and Staff Accountant, who will work alongside external contractors and our Controller to ensure the function operates with the accuracy and transparency GiveWell is known for. How does this role interact with other teams at GiveWell? Because of this role’s focus on accounts payable and employee expenses, you’ll interact with colleagues across nearly every team at GiveWell—giving you visibility into the organization well beyond the finance function. Who would do well in this role? You take pride in accuracy and find genuine satisfaction in getting the details right. You’re proactive, take ownership of your work, and thrive in a collaborative, evolving team. You’re a fast learner who can navigate ambiguity and help improve processes as the organization grows. You have a low-ego approach — you welcome feedback and care more about getting it right than being right. You’re aligned with GiveWell’s mission and values. What are some reasons I may not like this role? This role may not be a good fit if repetitive, transactional work isn’t something you find satisfying. While there’s real opportunity to improve processes over time, some of the day-to-day will be routine as that’s the nature of accounts payable work. You’ll also be juggling multiple workstreams at once, so if managing competing priorities or working without a lot of structure feels uncomfortable, this role may not be the right match. Additionally, GiveWell staff highly value direct feedback, in line with our organizational values of truthseeking and transparency. This role may not be right for you if you struggle to hear or incorporate feedback on your work. What does growth look like in this role? GiveWell’s finance function is still being built, and your growth will be tied directly to that. As the team and organization scale, you’ll have increasing opportunities to take on more complex projects, such as owning a process end-to-end, leading a system improvement, or taking on additional technical areas. In the meantime, there’s no shortage of opportunities to deepen your skills and help shape a best-in-class nonprofit finance function. What does this hiring process entail? We’ll use a combination of interviews and a work trial to assess the qualities described above. 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. 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. 30-minute introductory conversation with our Talent Acquisition Team Take-home assessment 90-minute interview with Controller 75-minute values interview 30-minute interview with Chief Operations Officer Reference checks Offer 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.