Multiple roles in AI x Global Health and Wellbeing

Multiple roles in AI x Global Health and Wellbeing

Coefficient Giving is scaling its giving significantly over the next few years, and we are excited to build a new team to make grants at the intersection of AI and global health and wellbeing.

We think AI progress will reshape health and economic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) — possibly compressing decades of medical progress into years, and possibly threatening the growth pathways that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. To help ensure AI’s benefits reach the people who need them most, we are hiring Associate Program Officers and Research Fellows to join our AI x Global Health & Wellbeing (GHW) team. These are high-leverage roles where whoever we hire will help decide what we fund in this space.

 

About Coefficient Giving

Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) is a philanthropic funder and advisor. Since 2014, we’ve directed over $7 billion in grants as part of our mission to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. It's also a pivotal moment for Coefficient Giving: We gave around $1 billion last year, and are on track to more than double our giving this year. We work with a range of donors who share our commitment to cost-effective, high-impact giving. Our current funds include Science and Global Health R&D, Navigating Transformative Artificial Intelligence, Abundance & Growth, Farm Animal Welfare, Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness, and more.

We’re proud of our track record:

• Our grants to evidence-backed global health programs have saved over 100,000 lives, and our farm animal welfare grants have improved the lives of over 3 billion animals.

• We supported late-stage clinical trials for the R21 malaria vaccine, now being scaled to protect millions of kids globally.

• We were the earliest major funder of the YIMBY movement to build more housing. Our grantees have led the charge on major wins like City of Yes in New York, and SB 79 in California, which will enable hundreds of thousands of new housing units.

• We jump-started the field of AI safety and security and have played a vital role in addressing other existential threats, such as mirror bacteria.

 

About the AI x Global Health and Wellbeing team

The GHW team makes grants across scientific research, policy advocacy, and global health and development to serve our mission of helping others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We prioritize grants with the potential to improve health outcomes and economic wellbeing, with most of our work focused on people living in LMICs.

The AIxGHW team is new, and it sits within our Cause Prioritization team. Our job is to set the strategy for CG’s work at this intersection, conduct research to figure out which approaches are most promising, and make up to $100 million in cost-effective grants in the next year. Our grantmaking falls into two broad categories:

• Mitigating noncatastrophic but serious risks to global health and wellbeing from transformative AI.

• Ensuring that new AI-enabled solutions to improve health and economic outcomes globally get built and scaled effectively.

Here are some illustrative projects we would be excited to fund:

• Seed funding for a new policy organization on faster drug development. A small organization focused on what major global health funders and multilaterals should be doing now to prepare for accelerated medical breakthroughs.

• Technical assistance program for governments redesigning their safety nets for AI-driven job losses. Fund a small team embedded within an LMIC government to help redesign cash transfer targeting, eligibility, and financing mechanisms that are robust to labor market disruption.

• Building a data access layer. Set up proposals for data-sharing frameworks, consent, and privacy protections to enable cheaper and faster impact evaluation of global health interventions, including RCTs and monitoring.

• AI-interpreted diagnostics to narrow healthcare infrastructure gaps. Phone or handheld tools that read chest X-rays for tuberculosis, retinal images for diabetic retinopathy, or cervical images so that under-resourced health workers can access specialist-grade input.

• Frontline public-worker support. Legal aid drafting and case triage for overloaded courts; translation and summarization of case files.

• Open public datasets, especially in specific domains and in local languages. Labeled text/speech for under-resourced languages, particularly in high-importance sectors (e.g. Yoruba × agriculture, Swahili × health, etc.).

• LMIC-specific AI benchmarks. Build benchmarks that reflect local epidemiology, languages, and contexts and track frontier model performance on them over time.

• Usage studies. Baseline descriptive or causal studies that establish the value of out-of-the-box models, how people in LMICs use them, and the impact of those uses. This information might motivate AI usage training programs in LMICs.

• New “AI for good” accelerators and incubators. These programs might draw on local talent familiar with the contexts for deployments, e.g. recruiting clinicians or health workers to deploy local AI for Health tools.

• Climate-sensitive disease early warning. Forecasting outbreaks of climate-linked diseases (e.g. malaria, dengue, cholera) from environmental and ecological signals, so that bednets, vaccines, drugs, and water treatment resources reach people before a surge rather than after.

This list of potential projects is far from exhaustive, but it illustrates the range of work we’re considering as well as our uncertainty about which interventions will be most impactful.

Across the org, we're significantly scaling our grantmaking and rapidly growing our team to support it, in part because we expect to see large increases in philanthropic funding flowing into the fields where we work in the coming years. Accelerating now lets us fill cost-effective gaps today, and helps lay the groundwork for new donors to step in as well.

Growth at this pace means the work is fast, ambiguous, and often messy: we need to make big decisions, pivot quickly, and make trade-offs. We think this is a uniquely high-leverage moment, and we're looking for people who find that energizing.

 

About the role

This role would involve:

• Investigating and recommending specific grants. The team currently has a $100 million exploratory grantmaking budget, with the ability to bid for more if we find sufficiently strong opportunities.

• Conducting desk research to assess potential strategies.

• Building back-of-the-envelope models to estimate the social returns and cost-effectiveness of potential grants.

• Interviewing domain experts and working with potential grantees to answer key questions.

• Synthesizing conclusions and recommendations in writing for senior leadership.

• Rigorously evaluating and synthesizing academic evidence relevant to our grantmaking.

The distinction between the Research Fellow and Associate Program Officer titles is one of emphasis rather than a hard boundary, and both will be evaluated through the same process.

Research Fellows tend to focus more on in-depth evidence reviews and academic literature synthesis, and typically have a master's or PhD in a quantitative discipline related to social science or public health.

Associate Program Officers tend to identify promising opportunities and propose how to evaluate them from a broad strategic direction, and to own grants that are more ambiguous or novel. They may have the same background as a Research Fellow or may come from a background in consulting, policy, or global health implementation.

We use these different titles to help make the role legible to people from different professional backgrounds, but your title won't be a major determinant of your responsibilities.

 

Who might be a good fit

We're looking for people with at least three years of relevant professional experience (or the equivalent in academia) who are excited to apply research and analysis to high-stakes decisions.

We're open to a wide range of experience levels. Some of our best hires have come in with three or four years of experience; others have had over a decade. We care more about the quality of your thinking and your aptitude for the responsibilities described above than the number of years you have worked. There is room to grow with strong performance.

We expect all our staff to put our mission first to help us realize our ambitious goals for impact, and to model our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness.

You may be a great fit for this role if you have:

• Interest in AI's implications for global health and wellbeing. You have views on how AI could change health and economic outcomes in LMICs, and you're eager to pressure-test them against evidence. You don't need technical AI expertise, but you should have some view on where the technology could help.

• Strong quantitative ability. You are comfortable performing back-of-the-envelope calculations in domains with sparse data, e.g. estimating the social returns and cost-effectiveness of potential grants.

• Pragmatism. You are able to make and justify reasonable estimates with limited data and come to concrete conclusions. You prioritize the most important questions to inform a decision rather than trying to answer everything.

• Strong written communication and reasoning transparency. You are able to communicate your thinking clearly and concisely and explain what you believe and why, including why you chose to weigh particular evidence over other evidence and where you’re uncertain.

• Strong listening ability and epistemic judgment. You are comfortable interviewing academics, policymakers, and practitioners in areas where you are not the expert, engaging with curiosity, asking the right questions, and updating your conclusions with new information.

• Comfort with trade-offs. You are comfortable with opportunity cost and engaging in prioritization.

• Flexibility. You are willing and able to work across a range of topics and do the work that's most important.

We're particularly interested in candidates with the following backgrounds, though many others may be a good fit: policy research, strategy consulting, or other roles applying analysis to practical decision-making; academia, particularly social science or public health; and experience in AI or international development, particularly in more analytical roles.

The ideal candidate will possess many of the skills and experiences described above, but there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. If you are on the fence about whether you are qualified, we strongly encourage you to apply.

 

Role details & benefits

• Compensation:

  • The baseline compensation for the Research Fellow and Associate Program Officer roles is $204,500, which would be distributed as a base salary of $180,000 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $24,500.

    • These compensation figures assume a remote location; there would be geographic adjustments upwards for candidates who are based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington, D.C. and are willing to work from our local office approximately two days per week or more.

    • There would also be an adjustment upwards for candidates based in New York who are willing to work from our coworking hub at least one day per week.

• Time zones and location: We offer remote work in many countries, and we are open to hires outside the U.S. The current Cause Prioritization team is split between the U.S. and Europe, and we expect candidates to be open to the occasional flexible call.

  • We are happy to consider sponsoring U.S. work authorization. However, we don’t control who is and isn’t eligible for a visa and can’t guarantee visa approval.

• Benefits: Our benefits package includes:

• Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the U.S. for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.

• Dental, vision, and life insurance for you and your family.

• Four weeks of PTO recommended per year.

• Four months of fully paid family leave.

• A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive. This policy also includes a productivity benefit, which provides a set amount for staff to expense items that enhance their productivity.

• A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered.

• Support for remote work — we’ll cover a remote workspace outside your home if you need one, or connect you with a Coefficient Giving co-working hub in your city. We currently have offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and multiple staff working from several other cities in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• We can’t always provide every benefit we offer U.S. staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country).

• Start date: Ideally, we’d like new hires to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we can be flexible for exceptional candidates.

We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.

 

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@coefficientgiving.org.

 

Please apply by 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, October 4th, 2026 to be considered.

 

U.S.-based research staff are typically employed by Coefficient Giving’s 501(c)(3), and as such are likely eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.

 

We may use AI to assist in the initial screening of applications, including to detect whether candidates have used AI models in drafting their application. Decisions are always made by a human on our team.

If you have any questions about our use of AI tools, you can email jobs@coefficientgiving.org.