Product Lead, Cash Delivery Platform at GiveDirectly

About GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly (GD) aims to reshape international giving – and millions of lives – by providing cash grants directly to the world’s poorest. The Brookings Institution estimates that $70B of cash transfers would be required to eliminate the poverty gap; the aid sector currently spends $135B each year, much of it on evidence-free interventions. GiveDirectly wants to change that, establishing cash transfers as a benchmark for foreign aid – as the index fund is a benchmark for the financial industry – and in the process accelerating the end of extreme poverty.

GD has raised over $1B since launching in 2011, delivered cash to more than 1.5 million people in 15 different countries. We’ve also supported large-scale, experimental research that indicates strong recipient impact of our programs. As a result, GD has been celebrated as one of the most innovative non-profit companies by Fast Company, while the growing cash transfer movement (and GD’s leading role within it) have been featured in the New York Times Magazine, This American Life, Foreign Affairs, and The Economist.

Our culture is candid, analytical, agile, and non-hierarchical. Our global team of ~150, and country operations teams of ~650, together come from 21 different countries speaking 69 different languages. From software engineers to seasoned humanitarian workers, former management consultants to public servants, researchers to field operations -- it’s an incredible group of people.

Our values are central and deliberately opinionated. We genuinely center the people we serve in our decision making, and strive to build an ambitious, dynamic and high performing environment. We strongly encourage you to read through our values carefully, if they reflect how you like to work and energize you, this could be a great fit.

We work hard to create an environment in which all our team members can thrive, succeed and grow.  We support flexibility, take care of each other, have fun, and create professional growth opportunities.

Location: This role is fully remote but must overlap with an East Africa timezone by at least 3 hours. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.S. or U.K. at this time.

About this role

Tech encodes every aspect of GiveDirectly’s programs – from the way a field officer interacts with a potential recipient to collect enrollment data, to actually sending a recipient mobile money. We are making a big investment in our software for cash delivery, because we believe it can 8-10X how fast we can deliver our fastest programs, and improve quality and recipient experience throughout.

We are seeking a Product Lead, Cash Delivery Platform to define and lead this platform. You will design systems and abstractions that shape our cash delivery, owning the roadmap across capabilities like survey building, eligibility & verification, fraud detection, payments, and case management. You will work closely with engineers, field operations, and research teams to design, build, and scale a system that ensures cash gets to the right recipients faster, more efficiently, more securely, and with better recipient experience.

This is not an execution-focused feature-shipping role, or an iterative optimization role – this is a new role, and we’re looking for a leader who has had multiple repetitions defining products from the ground up, and a track record of creating clarity, scale, and reuse from messiness.

Level: Director

Reports To: VP, Technology

Travel: Must be willing to travel to program sites up to 1X per quarter for 1-2 weeks

Responsibilities: 

Product Vision & Definition

• Define the long-term product vision for GiveDirectly’s cash delivery platform, cutting away historical complexity while building for future flexibility where needed
• Pair strong technical expertise with deep understanding of many users – including field officers, recipients, and technical program managers – to design the platform and its abstractions

Strategic Roadmap & Prioritization

• Own the roadmap for platform capabilities like survey tooling, eligibility and KYC, fraud detection, payments, and case management
• Make high-leverage prioritization decisions across multiple product lines and internal teams
• Define and track success metrics for the platform

Detailed Product Design & Execution

• Lead end-to-end product development from problem discovery and user requirements gathering to launch and iteration, hand-in-hand with engineering
• Partner with engineers to define robust abstractions and platform boundaries – ask the right questions, internalize technical tradeoffs between approaches, and shape coherent, scalable product logic

Cross-functional Stakeholder Management

• Align diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders with competing priorities
• Collaborate with programs product leads, technical program managers, engineering, operations, and field teams to ensure that platform investments serve real, validated program requirements

Qualifications: 

• Exceptional alignment to GD values, passion for our mission, and commitment to recipient dignity and empowerment. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
• 8+ years of technical software product management, including multiple full-lifecycle "zero-to-one" builds
• High technical fluency — you should be able to engage deeply with engineers on architecture, APIs, and system design
• High empathy for non-technical users and an eye for UX
• Experience in a high ambiguity, low-structure environment — you create clarity, not wait for it
• Ability to collaborate inclusively with stakeholders across varied social, national, and cultural backgrounds, including communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Analytical problem solver: looks at problems with analytical and iterative mindset, with strong framework for prioritization 
• Bonus: experience working with users experiencing poverty, with low digital literacy, and/or low or no network connectivity

Apply

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/givedirectly/jobs/4576439005?gh_src=oIcbvw