Director, Quantitative Research Governance and Reproducibility

The mandate

The Director will create a permanent research-governance discipline in which quantitative conclusions can be reproduced, challenged and traced from question through data, code, experiment and decision. The objective is not academic publication or administrative documentation. It is to prevent hidden researcher degrees of freedom, irreproducible results and selective success from entering consequential use.

The first hundred days will sample recent studies across distinct methods and reconstruct their environments, source snapshots, exclusions, hyperparameter choices, benchmark logic and reported uncertainty. The appointee will identify whether reproducibility fails because evidence was not captured, code and data drifted, reviewers lacked independence or decisions moved before verification. No research topic, dataset or platform is disclosed before authorised access.

Delegated authority includes setting research evidence standards, requiring independent replication, restricting release where provenance fails and retiring results whose use exceeds approved claims. Underlying decisions, model approvals and source-data ownership remain with existing executives. The Director must calibrate requirements to consequence so exploratory work remains possible without being mistaken for validated evidence.

By month six, material research should use versioned questions, data snapshots, executable methods, benchmarks and decision records. By year end, independent replication should precede high-consequence adoption, failed or null results should be retained, and monitoring should test whether claims transport to live populations and changing conditions.

The role will build principal researchers able to review across teams, expose uncertainty and defend negative findings. Long-term value will come from institutional memory and credible challenge, not a central repository that is complete in appearance but impossible to rerun.

What you will own

• Define consequence-based research standards covering question, estimand, data, code, benchmark, uncertainty and decision use.
• Require point-in-time data snapshots, transformation lineage, environment capture and deterministic or explained stochastic execution.
• Establish independent replication proportionate to the consequence and novelty of the intended use.
• Govern analytical choices, exclusions and hyperparameter search so undisclosed flexibility cannot inflate results.
• Preserve null, adverse and abandoned findings with reasons, preventing selective institutional memory.
• Restrict claims or deployment when reproducibility, external validity or use boundaries remain inadequate.
• Monitor whether research conclusions survive live data, population change and operational implementation.
• Develop cross-team research reviewers through replication assignments and delegated release decisions.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate leadership of quantitative research governance across materially different analytical methods.
• Describe a result that failed independent replication and the hidden choice or evidence gap discovered.
• Show how you preserved exploratory freedom while preventing exploratory output from entering production as validated evidence.
• Evidence governance of multiple testing, researcher discretion, benchmark selection and negative results.
• Provide a reproducibility standard that included data state and execution environment, not code alone.
• Explain how a live population change invalidated transport of an otherwise credible finding.
• Show development of senior researchers into independent reviewers of one another’s work.

Working terms and boundaries

• This permanent full-time role owns research evidence standards and delegated release or use restrictions.
• Model approval, source-data ownership and final executive decisions retain their established accountable owners.
• Incentives reward reproducibility, honest learning and leadership depth, not the count of positive research outcomes.
• Hybrid attendance supports replication reviews, sensitive decision forums and cross-team capability building.
• Publications, financial interests, provider relationships and prior studies require conflict disclosure.

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 9 October 2026. Mandate reference QNT-PER-2026-SEL-29.