Senior Research Manager for Sponsored Research

YOUTH VILLAGES, INC.

1d•Remote

About The Position

Youth Villages is seeking a strategic, highly organized Senior Research Manager for Sponsored Research to lead complex research and evidence-building initiatives supporting program improvement, service expansion, and child welfare system change. Reporting to the Director of Research, this role provides scientific and project leadership across multi-partner initiatives involving Youth Villages teams, external research partners, and state and local child welfare agencies. The position ensures research and administrative data address meaningful strategic questions, inform decisions, and strengthen evidence use across Youth Villages and its public-sector partnerships. The role has primary responsibility for coordinating Map2Impact, a multi-state partnership with the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall, and connects this work with broader research, evaluation, implementation, and scaling priorities. The position provides strategic and scientific leadership for sponsored research, supports evidence use and public-system partnerships, leads complex research projects, strengthens organizational capacity to use evidence, and connects evidence across organizational priorities. Work is performed from a secure, private home office with reliable high-speed internet and a moderate noise level consistent with a standard home office.

Requirements

Doctorate in psychology, public policy, public administration, social work, epidemiology, or a related social or behavioral science field.
At least 5 years of related experience.
Strong expertise in quantitative research methods, study design, statistical analysis, and interpretation of complex observational data.
Ability to critically evaluate research questions, analytic approaches, and the strength and limitations of evidence.
Understanding of implementation science, applied research methods, program evaluation, and/or continuous improvement.
Demonstrated success leading complex, multi-partner initiatives involving multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.
Excellent project management and organizational skills, including the ability to manage multiple workstreams simultaneously.
Ability to build productive relationships with researchers, organizational leaders, practitioners, and government or public-system partners.
Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and facilitation skills, including the ability to translate complex quantitative findings for non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with large administrative or longitudinal datasets.
Experience teaching, training, mentoring, or facilitating learning for adult audiences.
Experience working with child welfare or other public human-services systems.

Responsibilities

Develop and manage learning agendas for sponsored research projects, identifying priority questions, analyses, evidence needs, and milestones with partners.
Ensure research initiatives are designed to inform strategic, programmatic, policy, or practice decisions.
Provide scientific guidance on research questions, analytic approaches, interpretation, and appropriate use of findings.
Evaluate analytic methods, assumptions, findings, and limitations, and facilitate resolution of methodological questions with research partners.
Review reports, dashboards, visualizations, and other products to improve clarity, usability, and relevance for decision-makers.
Identify emerging evidence needs and opportunities to refine, expand, or standardize analytic approaches.
Provide research partners with context about Youth Villages services, implementation, organizational priorities, and relevant policy and practice environments.
Work with Youth Villages teams and state and local partners to identify strategic questions that research and administrative data can address.
Facilitate interpretation of findings in light of policy, practice, service, implementation, and jurisdictional context.
Track partner priorities, available evidence, key findings, decisions informed by evidence, open questions, and next steps.
Support data-sharing processes and help address organizational or relationship barriers affecting research partnerships.
Support onboarding and engagement of new jurisdiction partners and expansion of evidence-building initiatives.
Facilitate cross-jurisdiction learning through communities of practice and other opportunities to share findings, approaches, and lessons learned.
Coordinate dissemination through presentations, reports, publications, conferences, and other forums with Communications and other teams as appropriate.
Coordinate work across Youth Villages teams, external researchers, public-system partners, and other collaborators.
Manage project plans, timelines, deliverables, dependencies, decisions, and communications across workstreams and jurisdictions.
Maintain shared project-management systems that show priorities, responsibilities, decisions, deliverables, barriers, and next steps.
Ensure partners receive timely feedback, decisions, contextual information, and access to appropriate staff and stakeholders.
Maintain continuity of decisions and commitments across teams, meetings, and workstreams.
Identify competing priorities, barriers, and delays, and assess implications for commitments, staffing, budgets, and timelines.
Lead regular partnership check-ins and contribute to assessing partnership effectiveness and progress toward shared goals.
Develop learning opportunities, facilitation, coaching, tools, and resources that strengthen staff and partner ability to use evidence systematically in decision-making.
Help teams distinguish observations from hypotheses, identify potential drivers of outcomes, select responsive strategies, and define measurable expected results.
Support use of the EDGE (Evidence-Driven Growth & Excellence) framework and other structured approaches to evidence-informed decision-making where appropriate.
Help teams interpret evidence, formulate testable explanations, select appropriate responses, and assess whether strategies are producing expected results.
Integrate evidence-use practices into communities of practice and other shared-learning and continuous-improvement opportunities.
Connect research, evaluation, implementation, scaling, and system-change initiatives so relevant evidence is shared and used across portfolios.
Collaborate with colleagues responsible for Intercept and other program scaling and evaluation efforts to identify how administrative data and research findings can inform expansion, implementation, practice, and policy.
Coordinate research questions, timelines, evidence products, interpretation, and dissemination when initiatives intersect.
Identify opportunities to synthesize findings across projects to inform broader organizational strategy and learning.

Benefits

Medical, dental, prescription drug, and vision coverage.
401(k).
Two weeks of paid vacation for full-time employees; one week for part-time employees.
12 paid sick days per year.
11 paid holidays.
Paid parental leave.
Mileage and cell phone reimbursement when applicable.
Tuition reimbursement and licensure supervision.
Growth and development through continuous training.
Clinical and administrative advancement opportunities. Benefits are excluded for variable-status employees.