Senior Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist

The International Republican Institute (IRI) advances democracy and freedom. We link people with their governments, support politicians to be responsive to citizens, and motivate those citizens to engage in the political process.

At IRI, every employee plays a crucial role in advancing our mission across the globe. We’re looking for passionate individuals who embody our Core Values and are eager to contribute to our dynamic team. Our values include:

• Respect: We lead with trust, empathy, and dignity; empowering colleagues and partners.
• Teamwork: We collaborate across teams; solve problems together; are humble and ready to learn.
• Ownership: We take initiative; champion solutions; deliver results for IRI’s mission.
• Excellence through Execution: We balance thoughtfulness with timeliness; learn from results; prioritize progress over perfection.
• Transparency: We share information openly; give direct feedback; build trust through honest communication.
• Freedom: We are empowered to make decisions, try new approaches, and adapt as needed.

• →Coordinate with project leadership, project staff, regional teams, partners, subrecipients, consultants, participating media outlets, and technical service providers on M&E activities.
• →Manage M&E-related consultants or technical specialists, including deliverables, schedules, methodological alignment, and scope performance.
• →Participate in project planning, implementation, reporting, and review meetings when monitoring evidence or M&E guidance is needed.
• →Travel internationally as needed to support data collection, assessments, monitoring, training, partner coordination, or other project requirements.
• →Other duties as assigned.

• Serve as the project’s lead for day-to-day monitoring and evaluation workflows, ensuring systems align with the theory of change, objectives, deliverables, and donor requirements.
• Maintain the Performance Monitoring Plan, including indicators, targets, tracking systems, data collection roles, schedules, procedures, and quality expectations.
• Coordinate with project staff, partners, subrecipients, consultants, technical service providers, and IRI’s MEL team to support data collection, technical quality assurance, and compliance with IRI standards.

• Lead and coordinate baseline data collection and analysis, including content, audience, media-market, business-operations, revenue, expenditure, and sustainability data.
• Develop, test, and refine baseline and remeasurement methodologies, protocols, templates, surveys, interview guides, assessment tools, and data management processes.
• Ensure assessment findings inform project planning, participant support, technical assistance, and adaptive management.

• Design, pilot, and maintain quantitative and qualitative data collection tools tailored to participating countries, languages, media markets, and outlet types.
• Compile, clean, manage, analyze, interpret, and triangulate data from surveys, assessments, interviews, partner reports, training assessments, publication reviews, content analysis, and other project sources.
• Produce data summaries, visualizations, dashboards, analytical products, written findings, and project deliverables for internal use and donor reporting.
• Lead funder-required reporting processes, including drafting quarterly, baseline, midline, and final reports, while maintaining verifiable supporting documentation for reported results.
• Lead regular data review, pause-and-reflect, and adaptive-management sessions with project staff and implementing partners.
• Monitor contextual, political, security, and media-market developments that may affect implementation, participant safety, measurement, or interpretation of results.
• Document lessons learned, promising practices, implementation challenges, adaptations, and decisions, and ensure findings inform project management and donor communications.

• Establish and maintain data quality assurance procedures covering validity, reliability, timeliness, precision, integrity, completeness, and consistency.
• Conduct routine data reviews, verify supporting evidence, identify missing or inconsistent information, and follow up as needed.
• Ensure all M&E activities follow informed-consent, confidentiality, data-protection, participant-safeguarding, and do-no-harm standards.
• Coordinate with IRI’s MEL team to provide targeted M&E training, coaching, and technical assistance to project partners as needed.

• Coordinate the project’s final impact assessment and serve as the primary liaison with the contracted external evaluator.
• Support the evaluator’s scope of work, procurement, and contract-management processes in coordination with project staff.
• Provide relevant baseline data, PMP documentation, indicator data, project reports, reflection-session records, and other project materials to support the assessment.
• Review proposed methodologies and draft deliverables for quality, consistency with baseline approaches, and comparability across measurement rounds without directing findings.

We seek a passionate, experienced, and technically fluent individual with:

• Undergraduate degree in monitoring and evaluation, political or social science, international relations, statistics, research methods, international development, or a related field. Graduate degree preferred.
• Minimum five years of relevant professional experience, including substantial experience in monitoring and evaluation for international development, democracy and governance, independent media, information integrity, or a related field.
• Demonstrated experience designing and managing monitoring and evaluation systems for complex, multi-country or multi-partner projects.
• Demonstrated ability to operationalize theories of change, logic models, performance monitoring plans, indicator matrices, performance indicators, targets, and measurement strategies.
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing baseline studies, assessments, remeasurement exercises, or performance evaluations.
• Strong qualitative and quantitative research skills, including experience designing surveys, semi-structured interviews, assessments, observation or monitoring tools, and other data collection instruments.
• Demonstrated ability to clean, manage, analyze, interpret, and present qualitative and quantitative data.
• Experience working with geographically dispersed partners or participants and adapting data collection approaches across different languages, operating environments, and levels of organizational capacity.
• Experience applying ethical research, informed-consent, data-protection, participant-safeguarding, and do-no-harm principles.
• Strong facilitation skills and experience leading data review, reflection, learning, or adaptive-management sessions.
• Demonstrated ability to manage consultants, evaluators, or other technical service providers and review technical deliverables for quality and methodological consistency.
• Strong project management, organization, attention to detail, and time-management skills.
• Ability to prioritize multiple concurrent data collection, analysis, reporting, and coordination requirements and meet established deadlines.
• Ability to work independently with limited supervision while collaborating effectively with project staff, partners, consultants, and participating organizations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office required.
• Experience with U.S. government-funded cooperative agreements, grants, performance reporting, or monitoring and evaluation requirements preferred.
• Experience monitoring independent-media, media-sustainability, information-integrity, countering-foreign-influence, or related programming preferred.
• Experience with content analysis, audience analytics, digital-platform data, media monitoring, revenue data, or other media-sector measurement approaches preferred.
• Ability and willingness to travel internationally as required.