Manager, New Program Development

Evidence Action•Washington, DC

2d•$71,400 - $80,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Evidence Action is seeking a Manager to lead the development of new health programs within its Accelerator, a venture-style pipeline focused on identifying and scaling promising health interventions. This role involves owning early-stage interventions from research insights to proven, fundable programs, or making clear decisions to discontinue them. The ideal candidate will possess the analytical rigor to interrogate evidence and the drive to build programs that work in the real world, ultimately aiming to deliver the most health impact per dollar spent. The Manager will join a collaborative team that prioritizes evidence, bold thinking, and urgent action, reporting to the Director of the Accelerator.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in quant social science, program management, international development, or global health in a cross-country setting.
Read primary research and study design critically, synthesize large and conflicting evidence bases, and form an honest view of what the evidence does and does not support.
Build or rigorously interpret cost-effectiveness, epidemiological, or statistical models, and reason clearly about assumptions, sensitivity, and uncertainty.
Design lean learning activities that target the uncertainty actually blocking a decision, and deliver them on a timeline.
Move things forward amid uncertainty, building, prototyping, and unblocking rather than waiting for perfect information.
Build trust and align both internal teams and external partners (researchers, implementers, government, and donors) across cultures and sectors toward a shared path.
Make complex technical findings clear and decision-useful for non-technical audiences, in writing and live.
Manage several workstreams at once, sequence sharply, and make defensible calls about where to spend scarce time.
Look for the reasons your favorite idea might be wrong, and welcome the same scrutiny of your own work.

Responsibilities

Own a portfolio of pipeline interventions, end to end. Drive several promising candidate programs through the Accelerator's stage-gate process, and decide what advances, what gets reshaped, and what exits our pipeline.
Interrogate the evidence with honesty. Assess each intervention's evidence base on the merits, including effect sizes and their quality, external validity, variability, negative and contradictory findings, and gaps.
Model impact and cost-effectiveness under uncertainty. Partner with the Cost-Effectiveness team to build and pressure-test CEAs, reasoning explicitly about assumptions, sensitivity, and uncertainty, and translating them into clear go/no-go implications.
Design and run decision-relevant learning in close collaboration with our MLE team. Scope and execute lean, rigorous field activities such as scoping, formative research, and pilots, to unblock decisions.
Build the case and align stakeholders. Craft compelling, evidence-grounded investment cases. Bring researchers, implementers, governments, and donors along, anticipate objections, unblock barriers, and create momentum.
Collaborate across Evidence Action. Work hand in hand with our Growth team to build necessary resourcing and funding, relevant Program teams who bring the implementation muscle, and the Country Teams who cultivate and manage the policy and government partnerships in the places we work.
Be Evidence Action's face with partners. Independently lead conversations with study authors, implementing organizations, government officials, and funders, and use those relationships to source new ideas and partnerships.
Strengthen the Accelerator's methods, AI-enabled workflows, and quality bar, and mentor analysts and interns on the workstreams you lead.