Senior Education Grantmaker

About Us

At Founders Pledge, our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to do immense good. Since launching in 2015, we’ve raised over $10 billion for the most impactful social causes. We offer the simplest path to impact for successful entrepreneurs, providing end-to-end giving infrastructure, pioneering research, and access to a worldwide network of experts.

In other words, we help tech leaders become strategic philanthropists. Our 2100+ members include the people behind industry-leading companies such as Airbnb, UiPath, Dropbox, Skype, Spotify, and Uber.

About the Role

Applications are open until January 8, 2026.

We’re looking for an Senior Education 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: our team has moved more than $80 million to highly cost-effective opportunities in education, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, over the past four years. As our first education specialist, you’ll have the responsibility for allocating similar amounts of money going forward. Reporting to our Global Health and Development Lead, Katrina Sill, you’ll research new potential interventions within education and investigate potential funding opportunities.

In this role, you will dedicate a large portion of your time to investigating specific funding margins: organizations and programs that can cost-effectively improve education programs 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.” Finally, you’ll be our human capital methodology lead, defining standards for how we measure education’s benefits and determining, based on rigorous evidence, what those benefits are.

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

What You'll Do

Grantmaking & Research

• Lead rigorous investigations into education and human capital interventions, with a strong focus on LMICs

• Evaluate specific funding margins and organisations against Founders Pledge’s bar for recommendation

• Produce clear, decision-relevant research outputs to inform member giving

• Make monthly, high-stakes grant recommendations, often involving significant uncertainty and trade-offs

Expanding the Frontier

• Identify and assess novel or underexplored education interventions

• Support the launch of new approaches through active, early-stage grantmaking

• Fund both proven, cost-effective programs and high-risk, high-reward “big bets”, including research

Methodology & Thought Leadership

• Act as the internal owner of education and human capital methodology

• Define how education outcomes are measured, valued, and compared

• Maintain a strong evidence base while exercising judgement under uncertainty

Stakeholder Engagement

• Work closely with internal colleagues and external partners to move opportunities to funding

• Engage with UHNW donors as the subject-matter expert—answering detailed questions about evidence, assumptions, and trade-offs

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone with excellent analytical skills and domain knowledge, keen to work in a specialized education role and with an interest in impact maximisation.

You’ll likely have:

• Relevant domain expertise in education, development economics, cognitive science, or monitoring & evaluation

• Ideally with up-to-date knowledge of cost-effective education interventions in LMICs

• Excellent analytical ability, including comfort with quantitative reasoning and modelling

• Clear, concise writing, able to communicate complex evidence and uncertainty effectively

• Open-ended research skills, including identifying promising interventions, literature, and expert inputs

• Good calibration, with a strong sense of what you know, what you don’t, and how confident to be

• Intellectual curiosity and openness, including willingness to change your mind when evidence demands it

• Strong judgement and prioritisation, especially under time pressure

• High ownership and independence, with the confidence to lead your own research agenda

• Collaborative working style, with openness to feedback and direct communication

• Comfort operating in a high-growth, mission-driven organisation with ambiguity

Location, Travel, and Salary

• Location: UK, USA (ideally East Coast), or Germany

• Salary: Up to £90k / $120k / €100k, depending on location and experience

• Travel: Occasional travel for team and global offsites (typically twice per year)

Why Work With Us?

You can find more about the benefits we offer here, but what makes us truly special is both our mission and our people.

We’re a diverse team, from both charitable and commercial backgrounds, who believe that amazing things can happen when we tackle problems together.

We offer a flat structure and an opportunity to help shape the future of philanthropy.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at Founders Pledge. We seek people with different strengths, experiences, and backgrounds, who share our drive to understand and solve complex social challenges.

We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems requires different perspectives and unique ways of thinking, and we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone can do their best work.

If you’re excited about our mission but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply.