The Solutions Manager, Emergency Cash is responsible for driving the design and delivery of fit-for-purpose products or processes to address operational bottlenecks within GiveDirectly's Emergency Cash programs. This role requires a strong focus on structured discovery, stakeholder coordination, and ensuring proposed solutions are feasible, scalable, and sustainable. GiveDirectly is the first - and largest - nonprofit that lets donors like you send money directly to the world’s poorest. We believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives - cash enables that choice.
What you’ll do:
Solution Design & Delivery (~70%)
- Lead structured discovery to identify operational bottlenecks and drive design of fit-for-purpose products or processes.
- Coordinate with the Technical Program Managers, EC to translate high-level needs into detailed product requirements, workflows, and technical specifications.
- Manage pilots: coordinate stakeholders, track timelines, and capture insights for iteration.
- Partner with Tech, Delivery, and Operations to ensure proposed solutions are feasible, scalable, and sustainable.
- Build vendor relationships and conduct build-vs-buy analyses as needed.
Response Surge Support (~20%)
- Deploy during active response periods to support Technical Program Managers, EC adapt or configure existing tools to new contexts.
- Gather feedback from live operations and integrate learnings into the long-term solutions roadmap.
Learning & Collaboration (~10%)
- Ensure clear documentation of options, trade-offs, and solutioning outputs and learnings.
- Contribute to team planning, to product prioritization discussions and cross-team knowledge sharing.
- Partner with product, technology, operations, and research leads to translate business needs into technical or policy solutions.
- Provide engineers with clear requirements and regular feedback to ensure effective collaboration for build solutions.
Qualifications and Experience (What you’ll bring):
- Education: BA/BSc/HND qualification.
- Experience: 5+ years of experience in product management, service design, or humanitarian technology, with a track record of turning operational needs into solutions, products or workflows.
- Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. 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.
- Language Requirement: English.
- Experience defining and documenting solutions requirements and partnering with engineers, technical and operations teams to refine scope.
- Experience managing end-to-end solution cycles — scoping MVPs, leading pilots, gathering feedback, and driving adoption at scale.
- Strong analytical, problem–solving and systems-thinking skills, with the ability to evaluate trade-offs, propose pragmatic solutions, and make data-informed decisions.
- Technical fluency and comfort working across technical and non-technical teams, translating between the two.
- A bias for action and comfort in fast-moving, ambiguous environments - especially where constraints require creative and rapid experimentation.
- Preference: experience designing solutions for complex and challenging operating environments.
- Bonus: familiarity with cash programming, humanitarian operations, or user research in low-connectivity environments.
