Senior researcher, ai economic preparedness

Key Details

Compensation: $105,000 - $160,000

Location: Remote, with regular overlap with European and US working hours

Start date: January 2027

Travel: ~10–20%, including international travel

About Windfall

Windfall Trust is a policy research organization preparing governments and institutions for AI-driven economic disruption. We bring together researchers, economists, and decision-makers to map out impacts and surface workable options.

Windfall's mission is to ensure that the economic benefits of advanced AI are broadly shared, rather than captured by a few. We advise countries on their economic preparedness for transformative AI (TAI), drawing on our wider research, scenario workshops with economists, policymakers and civil society leaders, and the Policy Atlas, an evolving repository of policy options available to governments. We also have an internal database of AI economic indicators called the Windfall Observatory.

About the role

Windfall is running AI economic preparedness programs with national governments across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Each program examines how advanced AI could affect a country's development model (e.g., job automation exposure, labor-intensive manufacturing, traded services, remittances or commodity exports, fiscal situation), and helps its government decide what to monitor and how to respond.

Windfall is hiring a full-time Senior Researcher to provide research support across several of these country engagements. You'll analyze each country's economic exposure to AI, help design and run scenario workshops with senior officials, and support governments as they move from diagnosis to monitoring, policy and institutional change. We are building out our country preparedness approach with a range of international and local partners, and you'll help develop the methods and tools behind it.

What you'll do

Your work will span six areas:

• Country analysis: Develop the starting hypothesis for each country: where advanced AI could affect its economy, labor market and public finances, and which early indicators could show it. While relying on Windfall’s Observatory, help source and analyze the international data behind it (e.g., World Bank, IMF and ILO, national statistical offices).
• Scenarios and workshops: Help adapt Windfall's reference scenarios to each country's context, and prepare and run workshops with senior government officials, local experts and international partners. Learn more: https://windfalltrust.org/scenarios.
• Writing and briefing: Draft country briefs, workshop materials, scenario design, workshop summary reports, and help turn findings into short explainers for officials, partners and funders.
• Policy tools: Apply Windfall's research tools to each country, such as data dashboards of AI exposure, public opinion surveys, scenario reports and maps of policy options, working closely with Windfall's research team.
• Preparedness planning: Advise and support governments and local partners as they set up early-warning indicators, design policy responses and develop national preparedness plans.
• Learning and reporting: Set a baseline for each country, track changes in what its government monitors, decides and funds, and contribute to comparative findings across countries.

What you'll bring

Typically 3+ years of relevant experience in economic or policy research, international development, government advisory or a related field

Knowledge of development economics, such as labor markets, informality, structural transformation, trade or public finance, and public policy

Comfort working with country-level economic data and building a clear argument from it

Clear, rigorous writing for senior government and multilateral audiences

Experience working with governments, think tanks or international organizations, ideally in low- and middle-income countries

Great organization skills with the ability to manage several country workstreams and deadlines at once, with light supervision

A collaborative, reliable working style suited to a small team spread across time zones

A serious interest in how advanced AI could reshape economies, jobs and public finances

Nice to have:

Experience with a multilateral or development organization, or in strategy consulting

A background in foresight or scenario planning

Working knowledge of Python, R or Stata and of AI coding tools such as Claude Code

Experience convening expert networks or working groups

Experience in, or a working language of, one or more of the regions Windfall works in