Key details
Application deadline: 15 October 2026. We review applications as they arrive and may make offers before the deadline, so please apply early.
Start date: as soon as possible
Hours: 8 to 40 per week, agreed with you at offer
Contract: an initial six-month contract with a strong chance of extension. We are open to discussing a longer contract from the start.
Location: remote, any time zone
Compensation: $16 to $25 per hour for candidates with relevant experience, and $10 to $16 for early-career candidates. Our current team is paid $21 per hour. We are open to a higher rate for exceptional candidates.
Reports to: Director
Billions of dollars are about to be deployed into global health, and the charities receiving it have to decide where to launch, whom to hire and which problems to work on first. Health Progress Hub (HPH) helps them make those decisions well. We are a team of three, working roughly 1.5 full-time equivalents. As a small team with no philanthropic funding we have successfully supported Fortify Health, Taimaka, LEEP, HealthLearn, Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative, Radius Institute for Road Safety, Clear Solutions, First Embrace and Ambitious Impact. We have now received funding, and we want to grow our capacity to accelerate global health progress further.
This is our first hire. You would help high-impact charities choose the countries they launch in, and run applied research projects on the most pressing health challenges alongside emerging leaders from low- and middle-income countries, founders of leading charities and senior advisors.
About Health Progress Hub
HPH works to accelerate the implementation of proven, cost-effective health interventions in low- and middle-income countries.
Billions of dollars are about to be deployed into global health over the next few years, and we help organisations be ready for it and deploy it well. We do this in two ways.
Scaling support: We help global health organisations with the decisions and the people they need to launch and scale their programmes: country prioritisation research, recruitment for hard-to-fill roles, and partner identification. Our partners include Fortify Health, Taimaka, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), charities incubated by Ambitious Impact (AIM), and others. We provide these services at a fraction of the cost of comparable industry standards.
Field-building: We run global health fellowships that build the talent pipeline for high-impact global health work, and we develop research agendas on neglected problems that no organisation currently leads.
In addition to scaling support and field-building, we are building our own research capability, with two types of research:
Prioritisation research helps organisations decide where to launch and scale, and is our largest area of work. Through data analysis and country-specific qualitative research, we help strong charities scale faster and more effectively.
Applied research examines why proven interventions fail to reach the people who need them urgently, in four areas: lead exposure, transformative artificial intelligence (AI) and global health, market shaping for essential medicines, and health systems strengthening.
To date, our applied research has been limited and mostly internal. Our prioritisation research has supported Fortify Health and Ambitious Impact, and more organisations ask for it than we can currently serve. We want to change that, and we are hiring a Research & Scaling Officer to help us support more high-impact charities.
About the role
We are hiring one or two Research & Scaling Officers to help high-impact charities choose where to launch and scale, and to manage research projects run by emerging leaders from low- and middle-income countries, in collaboration with founders, advisors and senior government officials.
We may hire one person for the whole role, or two people who each take part of it. We care more about what you can do and why you want to do it than about how closely you match this description, and we plan to shape the work around the people we hire.
In your application, tell us how many hours you can commit and which areas interest you most. If any of the things we note below isn’t of interest to you, feel free to be honest in the application.
Your responsibilities
Prioritisation research
- We help organisations plan where to launch or expand. Depending on the organisation, we either lead the analysis or review the organisation's own work. From late November, we expect to support a new cohort of Ambitious Impact-incubated charities choosing their first country.
- Review the prioritization models and resources organisations use to score and compare countries, and the data behind them, and write up what should change
- Build or refine a weighted factor model for an organisation that wants to decide systematically where to expand
- Carry out in-depth scoping of the strongest countries: disease burden, health system, regulation, partners, costs and operating conditions
- Support HPH's internal strategy on which problems to prioritise
Research management
- HPH runs research projects in our four applied research areas, through our fellowships, on our own and with partners. Our current programme is the Global Health Project Sprint, which we co-lead from 5 October to 15 November 2026:
- Keep research projects on track: check each has a clear question, a realistic plan and a useful final output, and resolve problems with mentors and teams early
- Review projects at the midpoint and the end, and advise teams and mentors on scope
- Give written and verbal feedback to researchers and mentors who know their subject better than you do
- Help the strongest projects continue after the programme, with the original team, a partner organisation or HPH
Research strategy
- Improve the methods and quality standards HPH uses for prioritisation research, drawing on the engagements you work on
- Develop HPH's research agenda in one or more of our four applied research areas: the questions worth answering, who else is working on them, and which research agendas HPH should take on to catalyse effective action on them
- Identify how HPH can support researchers and research organisations working on high-impact issues
About you
We are most interested in what you are best at, what you have achieved so far and how you work.
How you work
- You build context fast: you can pick up a new project's question, deliverable and constraints in an hour and hold several projects in view at once.
- Things you take on stay on track week after week without anyone chasing you.
- If a project becomes unmanageable or proves more difficult than you envisioned, you don’t shy away from re-scoping it or asking for help from your team
- You give direct, useful feedback, in writing and on calls, including to people who know their subject better than you do and to your manager
- You work well with light supervision, and you write decisions and agreed actions down where others can find them.
What you have done
- You have done applied research or analysis yourself in global health, development or health policy.
- You have taken a piece of work from an open question to an output someone used to make a decision.
Why you want this
Impact is a major factor in your career decisions
You like building things: you have started or fixed a project, a team or a process before, and you want to do it again in a small organisation that plans to scale rapidly
Useful but not required
- Experience managing other people's research
- Experience with country prioritisation or weighted factor models
- Familiarity with health systems in low- and middle-income countries
- Work with, or close familiarity with, organisations such as Ambitious Impact, GiveWell-backed charities, or impact evaluation organisations such as the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)
- Fluent use of AI tools in research and analysis, and a view on where they help and where they don't
- Experience in a small or new organisation whether it’s a for-profit or a non-profit
- If you applied to the Global Health Project Sprint or are mentoring in it, you can still apply. You would not review any project you mentor or applied to join.
- We are looking for exceptional people rather than people who tick every box, and we welcome applications from people with other ongoing commitments. If you don't meet every criterion but think you would do this role well, please apply.
Why join HPH
Catalyse global health progress. Your work will shape where global health charities launch and expand. Our prioritisation research has informed Fortify Health's 195-country model for flour fortification and an AIM-incubated contraception charity's choice of provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan. From late November, a new cohort of AIM-incubated charities will use it to choose their first country. Alongside this, we recruit for hard-to-fill roles at organisations such as Taimaka, LEEP and the Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative, so the charities we help choose a country can also find the people to work there.
Shape Health Progress Hub. You are our first hire beyond the founding team. What you build here shapes how we work, whom we hire next, and how many organisations we can help. If you do well, there is a strong chance of a longer contract, and a more senior role as the team grows.
Work with people worth learning from. Emerging leaders from low- and middle-income countries, mentors from organisations such as the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), senior officials from several African governments, and founders of leading global health charities.
An agile team. We believe most non-profits can move much faster than they do, and we lead by example: we review every application within 48 hours, and we may make an offer within a week.
A team that cares. We work at pace because the problems are urgent, and we know we will not get where we want to go if the people who work here are not happy. We agree your hours around your life, provide predictability and structure so you can focus, and shape your role in line with your long-term plans and what you are excited about.
Honest terms. We publish our pay: $10 to $25 per hour depending on experience, the same range our current team sits in. The test task is paid, you’ll have real ownership and there is a strong chance for promotion.
Room for your own plans. Global health is full of unowned problems. If you find one, we are glad for you to grow into the person who owns it: setting the strategy and working with the funders, governments and organisations needed to move it. We also work part-time with people building their own projects.
Application process
- Application form (about 30 to 60 minutes)
- Paid test task for shortlisted applicants (about 2.5 hours)
- Interview
- A live work test
- Interview
- Reference checks (Please note that we may contact your references at any stage of the recruitment process as we deem appropriate)
We aim to review every application within 48 hours and may make an offer within a week of receiving yours. We may offer part-time contract work before a final decision. Please reply to our emails within two working days during the process. For questions or adjustments to the process, contact berke@healthprogresshub.org