Director, Research Operations

About this role

Director, Research Operations

College Board - Learning and Assessment
Location:

• This is a remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). All CB employees are required to occasionally travel to meet in person for business purposes.
Role Type:

• This is a full-time position
About the Team
Learning & Assessment is College Board's center for researching, designing, delivering, and strengthening high-quality assessments that serve more than 7+ million students annually and advance opportunities around the world. The division brings together 150+ experts in research, psychometrics, and assessment design and development to ensure our assessments are rigorous, accessible, and grounded in evidence. In close partnership with teams across College Board, Learning & Assessment leads innovation in assessment design, ensures valid, reliable, and error-free scores, and provides the evidence and insights that guide program strategy and shape understanding of important issues in the education sector.
The Research Team designs, conducts, and disseminates research and analyses to drive decision-making within College Board and by external stakeholders. The department includes 30+ interdisciplinary experts from education, economics, political science, psychology, public policy, sociology, and survey research. Our data and evidence address topics related to College Board assessments, programs, and initiatives as well as pressing questions in the broader education ecosystem. We influence a wide array of practitioners, policymakers, and the academic research community through publications spanning academic journal articles, reports, research briefs, and applied data tools.
About the Opportunity
Research is continuing to evolve, supporting a growing portfolio of analytics and evidence designed to be actionable and influential for decisionmakers across K12, higher ed, and policy at the federal, state, district, and institutional levels. As the scale and complexity of this work increases, there is an opportunity to strengthen the operational backbone that enables consistent delivery, cross-team coherence, and future-focused evolution—while preserving deep expertise and technical leadership.
The Director, Research Operations provides function-wide operational leadership to support this evolution. This role establishes prioritization mechanisms, builds a coherent cross-team operating model, and establishes and maintains an actionable evidence base that includes both internal and external research evidence. The Director reports to the Vice President, Research and partners closely with Executive Directors, who serve as the technical leaders for research, to ensure work is delivered effectively and sustainably while creating space for forward-looking technical leadership and expertise. The scope of this role is focused on building sustainable operational infrastructure and team capacity, rather than owning research projects.
In this role, you will:
Coordinate the Research Portfolio (50%)

• Build and maintain infrastructure to track and manage progress toward goals that gives the Vice President and Executive Directors real-time visibility to help drive decisions and course-corrections to stay on track to achieve outcomes.

• Refine and maintain the cross-team internal operating infrastructure, including portfolio tracking, cross-team communications, publication management, data/vendor/budget administration, reporting tools, and transparency tools.

• Reinforce clear accountability, role clarity, timing expectations, and execution ownership across the research portfolio.

• Assess risks, tradeoffs, and sequencing across the portfolio and recommend prioritization calls to the Vice President and Executive Directors.

• Organize workstreams, process and analyze data, synthesize literature, and provide transparency to internal partners, translating information into clear implications and recommendations for internal partners.

• Coordinate internal communications to support internal understanding of research evidence (e.g., quarterly meeting pre-reads with internal clients, quarterly newsletter) and manage the publications and dissemination processes (e.g., coordinating editorial, webpage, presentation materials).

Create and Maintain an Actionable, Dynamic Evidence Repository (30%)

• Monitor external research publications related to College Board’s research portfolio, synthesize evidence and its application to CB stakeholders, and combine with insights from CB Research to assess implications/flag strategic relevance.

• Maintain a research repository combining external and internal evidence that is dynamic, accessible, and actionable for the organization.

• Coordinate with CB programs and the Engagement and Reach team to ensure that evidence is utilized by decision-makers.
Manage Cross-Team Functions (20%)

• Own and drive the Research team’s operating functions and identify opportunities to standardize and simplify operational processes, tools, and workflows to drive efficiency; and scale it into a durable operating model that can scale with future team growth, including documenting and training team members to follow the processes.

• Oversee the Research team’s common data resources, data license procedures, vendor management needs, and budget management processes.

• Build and maintain relationships within the team’s Executive Directors to support cross-functional team initiatives.
About You
To qualify for this role, you must have:

• 5+ years of experience in research operations leadership, organizational enablement, or related roles in complex, technical, or analytics-driven environments and experience working closely with a senior executive.

• Bachelor’s degree

• Experience working closely with research teams or in research-adjacent environments, with a strong understanding of how research is designed, implemented, and…