Experimentation Governance Adviser

The mandate

This Adviser will help executive governance decide whether controlled experiments answer the intended decision question without exposing participants, operations or inference to avoidable risk. The appointment reviews design, stopping, analysis and learning standards. There is no line authority, experiment approval, operational command or ownership of the underlying intervention.

Two weekly adviser days will cover a fortnightly protocol clinic, monthly result review and two scheduled governance meetings. Management provides approved proposals, power analysis, allocation mechanics, guardrails, outcome definitions and analysis plans. The Adviser will not operate randomisation, access identities by default or certify legal and ethical compliance.

Challenge will cover unit of randomisation, interference, non-compliance, attrition, novelty, multiple testing, sequential monitoring, heterogeneous effect and implementation fidelity. The Adviser must detect cases where a precisely estimated metric answers a narrower or different question than the committee believes it does.

Guardrails will be treated as outcomes with their own measurement latency and uncertainty, not binary boxes checked at launch. The Adviser will challenge experiments whose primary effect appears quickly while material adverse consequences can only emerge after the proposed stopping point.

Accountable executives retain approval and all participant or operational consequences. Recommendations will specify what the design identifies, what it cannot, the cost of delay and acceptable learning alternatives. Where formal ethics, legal, privacy or safety review is required, the matter will be referred to its designated authority.

At four months, the organisation should have a protocol standard, pre-analysis and stopping checklist, result template and disposition log. Conflicts involving experiment vendors, advisers, counterparties, data interests or recent design work must be cleared before confidential interventions are named.

What you will own

• Review whether proposed experiments align population, treatment, comparator, outcome, horizon and decision threshold.
• Challenge power and minimum-detectable-effect assumptions for practical as well as statistical meaning.
• Test allocation, interference, attrition, non-compliance and implementation fidelity risks before launch.
• Require guardrails, stopping logic and sequential analysis rules to be agreed before outcome visibility.
• Ensure multiple testing and subgroup analysis preserve honest uncertainty and avoid post-hoc selection.
• Frame result papers around identified effect, limitations, external validity and management decision.
• Refer legal, ethical, privacy or safety questions rather than claiming advisory approval.
• Decline experiment operation, intervention ownership, participant decisions and line management.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate senior governance of controlled experiments used for consequential executive decisions.
• Describe an experiment that precisely answered the wrong decision question and how you identified the mismatch.
• Show how interference, attrition or non-compliance changed design or interpretation.
• Evidence sequential or stopping governance established before outcomes were observed.
• Explain how you prevented subgroup discovery from becoming an unsupported causal claim.
• Provide an example of referring ethical, privacy or legal review to the proper authority.
• Identify provider or prior-design conflicts relevant to independent advice.

Working terms and boundaries

• The four-month retainer covers two days weekly, fortnightly clinics and two scheduled meetings monthly.
• There is no line authority, launch approval, operational command, intervention ownership or ethics opinion.
• Management owns proposals, execution, participants, decisions and outcome consequences.
• Urgent reviews require reprioritisation or a signed change to the retainer.
• Conflicts are screened before interventions, vendors or datasets are disclosed.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 7 October 2026. Mandate reference QNT-ADV-2026-NBO-27.