Senior Research Manager - Children & Families

OMNI Institute is seeking an experienced Senior Research Manager to lead evaluation projects in our Children & Families practice area. Ideal candidates have experience managing large diverse teams and client relationships, overseeing projects from conceptualization to delivery, and are aligned with our core values. We strongly encourage individuals from underrepresented backgrounds to apply. (more is available at https://www.omni.org/edi).

As a Senior Research Manager, you will design and execute research and evaluation projects, build client relationships, and lead project teams. In the Children & Families practice, we partner with nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies to evaluate programs related to family support, early childhood, education, and child welfare. We are looking for a candidate who can lead complex studies—such as longitudinal designs, quasi-experimental studies, and randomized controlled trials—while incorporating approaches like logic models and formative evaluations.

Requirements

Key Qualifications

• A passion for solving pressing social challenges.
• The experience necessary to lead teams through complex, multi-disciplinary evaluation projects; typically, with extensive experience or training in quantitative and qualitative research methods in an academic or an applied social science context – often a Ph.D. with significant applied experience or a master’s degree with several additional years of experience.
• Demonstrated ability to work within an evaluation consulting environment and to meet our foundational Core3 requirements:
  • Commitment to timeliness and meeting deadlines in your work.
  • Comfort communicating and working within fluid and collaborative project teams.
  • A strong sense of personal ownership, self-direction, and accountability for your work.
• Alignment with our Core Values:
  • Connection: to hear, understand, and support your colleagues and your clients.
  • Agility: in how you think about and approach new challenges and novel solutions.
  • Inquiry: to look at information from different perspectives and learn from other approaches.
  • Accountability: to meet deadlines, receive & give candid and respectful feedback, and deliver your best work.
• Experience in centering equity, diversity, and inclusion and applying equitable evaluation approaches.
• Experience using R programming language to manage, analyze, visualize, and report on data; familiarity with R Markdown is highly desired.
• Experience conducting social return on investment studies is a plus.
• Bilingual in English and Spanish is a plus.

What this role will look like

Your work at OMNI will be primarily organized into multiple consulting project teams that deliver on a scope of work specified in a client contract. Examples include:

• Leading teams through the development and delivery of complex projects, such as
  • Partner with clients to specify research questions, conduct literature reviews, develop evaluation plans and data collection protocols, and design longitudinal studies, quasi-experimental studies, and RCTs that are aligned with client’s strategic priorities and meet funding requirements
  • Design and execute the methodological components of a complex study (e.g., integrating multiple mixed-methods data sources such as secondary data, interviews, and survey data to address research questions; conducting multi-site evaluations)
  • Produce high-quality and actionable reports, executive summaries, presentations, and other deliverables that make meaning of complex analyses in an approachable and rigorous way
  • Solicit, navigate, and integrate perspectives across multi-organization partnerships (e.g., Advisory Boards; community partnerships) to successfully access high-quality data needed to conduct evaluation projects, inform evaluation design, and make meaning of findings
  • Manage Institutional Review Board (IRB) application development, approval, and ongoing compliance, with an understanding of when and why IRB reviews are needed
• Guide and support other staff through tasks, such as:
  • Work with longitudinal datasets, typically under 1,000 records, collected through survey efforts
  • Access, manage, and incorporate complex client-generated or secondary datasets from local, regional, or national sources (e.g., administrative data from relational databases; state child welfare data)
  • Review R code and conduct quality assurance checks on data management and descriptive and inferential statistics (e.g., t-tests, chi-square, ANOVAs, linear regression, logistic regression, etc.)
  • Develop qualitative data collection protocols, conduct qualitative data collection (e.g., interviews, focus groups, journey mapping, etc.), and analyze the resulting data
• Serve as project leader and/or oversight, including:
  • Develop scopes of work that include budgets, staffing configurations, and work plans.
  • Develop external deliverables that integrate multiple methods.
  • Manage OMNI project teams and develop and monitor complex work plans/timelines/budgets.
  • Independently manage and grow client relationships to maintain and expand business opportunities.
• Supervise and mentor staff, providing ongoing feedback and guidance to support individual growth and performance.
• Identify key learnings and improvements from projects and contribute new and improved approaches to our knowledge management and best practice teams.

Diversity and Inclusion Statement

We encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply, particularly people of color, those who identify as LGBTQ+, first generation immigrants, those who were first in their families to attend college, and people who are from marginalized income backgrounds.

As a proud equal opportunity workplace, we believe that a diverse team is fundamental to living our core values. The inclusion of diverse perspectives provides new ways of asking questions (Inquiry), fresh approaches to tackling challenges (Agility), inspiration to produce better work (Accountability), and contribute to a greater shared understanding of our community and sense of connection among our staff and to our clients (Connection).

Salary & Benefits

This is a full-time position with a starting annual salary of $87,731 plus benefits, which include:

• 100% employer paid health premiums (employee coverage)
• Vision, dental, supplemental insurance
• 401k with company match and immediate vesting
• Flexible working schedules
• PTO that begins with 3 weeks of PTO, 11 floating holidays, and an annual office closure from Dec 24-Jan 1.

Please note that we do not negotiate salary and benefits as research indicates that negotiations disproportionately impact applicants identifying as people of color, women, or with other marginalized identities.

Location

This is a remote position within the continental US states.

OMNI Institute’s headquarters are in Denver, CO, where we have an office for staff to work from. Employees who work from home/remotely must have a suitable home office environment. We try to limit work travel, but employees can expect some travel for client meetings, conferences, or company meetings (expected up to 10% of the time).