Technical Director, Quantitative Research at Busara Center for Behavioral Economics

Job Description

• The quantitative Technical Director leads a team with two main responsibilities: to enable the rest of Busara to engage in high-quality quantitative work, and to pitch in and conduct particularly complex analyses themselves.  
• You and your team enable Busarians through our ongoing internal training program, through tool development, and through active mentoring and guidance.  
• Projects you and your team work directly contribute to include: complex experimental design and analyses, heterogeneous effects, and multi-level structural analyses of behavioral dynamics. 

Roles and responsibilities:

• Lead a small team of experts to directly contribute to behavioral science projects across the Global South. This includes quantitative research design, methodologies, and data analysis techniques, and optimizing research.  In short - do awesome quantitative work.
• Work with your team and our qualitative technical group to develop and deliver internal training, workshops, and resources to enhance the skills and capabilities of Busarians.  In other words – help others do awesome quantitative work. 
• Listen to and learn from the technical needs of fellow Busarians, to ensure that what your team offers serves these needs. 
• Help Busara leverage data and insights effectively, fostering cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Create and improve standards and methods for research design, methodologies, and quality assurance.
• Collaborate closely with internal and external stakeholders to ensure high technical standards. and promote best practices..
• Interface with clients, to explore their technical needs, and talk with them about the results and implications of projects in the field
• Partner with VPs and Directors to source and pursue opportunities for contracts 
• Think, write, and speak about new methods and approaches that Busara can benefit from.  These could be existing methods in the field, or new ones that you develop at Busara.

Requirements:

• Deep expertise in quantitative methods: from experimental design and research to statistical inference. Ideally, this includes machine learning and simulation approaches.
• A strong understanding of how these methods work in the field: with partial data, incomplete treatment compliance, biased enumerators, etc. 
• Enjoyment and expertise in applied behavioral science, including cognitive and experimental psychology and behavioral and experimental economics.    
• Experience with the realities of behavioral fieldwork: how to take academic knowledge into a practical process for designing interventions, when the environment can’t be controlled or fully understood
• Extensive hands-on experience with applied data science: converting data into insights
• Management experience, especially of diverse teams and multiple geographies
• The knowledge and temperament to be an internal consultant: listening and responding to the technical needs of your colleagues and clients
• The desire to work in the Global South (if you’re from here, or have experience here that’s best) 
• Excellent management and organizational skills; you and your team will need to effectively juggle a wide range of requests for help across the organization
• Fluent in written and spoken English. Other languages are great too, but English is required.
• Ideally, sectoral expertise in one of our focus areas: Health, Financial Services, Gender, Social Inclusion, Governance, and Agriculture.
• However, we’d learned that many applicants like to have a “benchmark” for the level of expertise that’s needed for a role. 
• Here, it would be training equivalent of a Master’s degree in Behavioral Science, Economics, Social Sciences, Public Policy, or related fields (and ideally a PhD in these fields); and experience equivalent to 4+ years of applied data science & behavioral science work.