Overview

• Contract: Asap through the end of June 2027

• Reporting to: VP of Delivery

• Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.

• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work. To ensure we maintain high standards of political neutrality, we also perform media and social media checks.

• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by:  9th October 2026

• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

About Apolitical

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Role

We’re looking for an experienced Monitoring, Evaluation & Data Lead to cover a period of parental leave.

This is a senior, hands-on role at the intersection of programme evaluation, impact reporting, and data. You’ll make sure we can understand and demonstrate the impact of our work, meet our commitments to partners and funders, and use evidence effectively to improve programme delivery and inform business decisions.

You’ll own our approach to evaluation and impact reporting across a portfolio of programmes and partnerships, including work with governments and multilateral organisations. You’ll also act as the bridge between our Data team and colleagues across Delivery, Partnerships, Product and Learning by turning sometimes ambiguous questions into clear measurement and reporting requirements, prioritising competing needs, and making sure measurement is designed into our work from the outset.

This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys combining evaluation rigour with pragmatism. You’ll inherit live programmes and reporting commitments, so there will be plenty to get your head around quickly. At the same time, you’ll have the opportunity to improve how we measure our impact and help colleagues make better use of evidence across Apolitical.

Team

You’ll report to our VP of Delivery and work closely with colleagues across Data, Delivery, Partnerships, Learning, Product and Engineering.

You won’t line-manage the Data team. Instead, you’ll provide prioritisation, direction and quality oversight, working closely with the team’s line manager and our data and analytics engineers.

As this is maternity cover, you’ll have a handover with the current post-holder before their parental leave begins, as well as an opportunity to hand the role back towards the end of the contract.

Tasks and remit

• Own evaluation and reporting across a live portfolio of programmes and partnerships, including contractual and grant reporting for government and multilateral partners.

• Translate contractual commitments, funder requirements and intended programme outcomes into practical measurement and reporting approaches.

• Make sure we have the right quantitative and qualitative evidence to report credibly on the reach, outcomes and impact of our work.

• Act as a senior point of contact on evaluation methodology, evidence and reporting for colleagues, funders and government partners.

• Maintain oversight of contractual reporting commitments and make sure deadlines are met.

• Own and evolve our approach to surveys across Apolitical’s programmes and learning experiences, ensuring consistent measurement, appropriate tracking and good data quality.

• Assess new measurement requests and determine what evidence we genuinely need, avoiding unnecessary or duplicative data collection.

• Identify where interviews, testimonials or other qualitative methods would strengthen our understanding, working with Research and Delivery colleagues to put these in place.

• Make sure personal data is handled appropriately, and our evaluation and reporting practices meet Apolitical’s data protection standards.

• Oversee incoming data, analysis and reporting requests from across Apolitical, distinguishing between needs colleagues can self-serve and those requiring dedicated Data team support.

• Work with our data and analytics engineers to set priorities for reporting, analysis and data-modelling work.

• Turn business, delivery and evaluation questions into clear requirements for the Data team, clarifying ambiguous requests and making trade-offs when priorities compete.

• Help colleagues understand what our data can — and cannot — tell us, so evidence is used appropriately in decision-making.

• Partner with Delivery, Partnerships, Learning, Product and Engineering as new programmes, partnerships, products and learning experiences are developed.

• Identify evaluation, tracking, survey and reporting requirements early enough for them to be designed into the work rather than addressed retrospectively.

• Bring together partner requirements, contractual commitments and internal priorities into a realistic programme of evaluation and data work.

• Help strengthen how Apolitical thinks about and demonstrates impact across our work.

• Contribute to evaluation of commercial and delivery feasibility and proactively surface complexities.

• Line-managing the Data team. This role provides prioritisation, direction and quality oversight, rather than people management.

• Working as a data engineer. You don’t need to write production code or own our technical data infrastructure.

• Doing evaluation in isolation. You’ll work across a stakeholder-rich organisation and will often need to reconcile different perspectives and priorities.

• Working from a perfectly predictable queue of requests. New partner, programme and business needs will emerge, and part of your role is deciding what matters most.

Onboarding milestones

Within one month, you will…

• Understand our live programme portfolio, key partner and funder commitments, and upcoming reporting deadlines.

• Complete the handover with the current post-holder (going on leave beginning in November) and build strong working relationships across Data, Delivery, Partnerships, Learning and Product.

• Understand our existing measurement approaches, surveys, reporting workflows and core tools.

• Take ownership of the evaluation and reporting priorities that need to be delivered during the maternity-cover period.

Within three months, you will…

• Independently lead evaluation and reporting across the programme portfolio, delivering high-quality outputs against contractual and funder commitments.

• Establish a clear and trusted process for prioritising incoming data, analysis and reporting requests.

• Work with programme teams to ensure measurement requirements are being identified early in new work.

• Identify practical opportunities to improve the consistency, quality or usefulness of our surveys, reporting or evaluation processes.

Within six months, you will…

• Be the trusted organisational lead for monitoring, evaluation and impact reporting, with colleagues and partners confident in the evidence behind our work.

• Have strengthened at least one significant aspect of how Apolitical collects, analyses or communicates evidence of impact.

• Demonstrate how evaluation and data have informed programme delivery or organisational decision-making.

• Have our major reporting commitments and evaluation priorities in good shape for a smooth handover at the end of the contract.

About you

This is a great fit if you…

• Have significant experience in monitoring, evaluation and reporting, including designing approaches to measuring programme outcomes and impact.

• Have delivered contractual, grant or funder reporting against defined requirements and outcomes.

• Are confident working hands-on with data and reporting tools. We use BigQuery, ThoughtSpot, Google Sheets and SurveySparrow, among others, but you don’t need to write production code.

• Have designed and managed surveys and other evaluation data collection and understand good practice around measurement, tracking and data quality.

• Can move comfortably between the detail of data and evaluation work and the bigger question of what a programme, partner or organisation actually needs to know.

• Combine rigour with pragmatism: you know when measurement needs greater depth and when a proportionate approach will give us what we need.

• Are good at prioritising competing requests and comfortable making judgement calls when there isn’t a single right answer.

• Communicate evidence and evaluation approaches clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior colleagues and external partners.

• Enjoy working across teams, bringing structure to ambiguity and helping other people make confident, evidence-based decisions.

• Are comfortable joining a scale-up where priorities change rapidly, and processes will continue to evolve.

Let us know in your CV if you have…

• Worked with governments, multilateral organisations or foundation partners.

• Worked on international development or other funder-led programmes.

• Developed or improved organisation-wide approaches to monitoring, evaluation or impact measurement.

• Experience combining quantitative evidence with interviews, testimonials or other qualitative approaches to understand impact.

• Have experience working with Data, Product or Engineering teams and can translate business or evaluation needs into clear requirements for technical colleagues.

This likely won’t be the right role if you…

• Want to focus primarily on advanced analytics, data engineering or writing production code. Those are not the core responsibilities of this role.

• Want a people-management position. You’ll provide direction and prioritisation to data work, but you won’t have direct reports.

• Prefer to receive clearly defined analysis requests rather than working out what should be measured, why it matters and what evidence is proportionate.

• Prefer a highly predictable roadmap. We work with partners, programmes and products whose needs can change, and you’ll need to make thoughtful trade-offs as priorities compete.

• Prefer evaluation to sit separately from programme and product delivery. We want measurement designed into our work from the beginning, which means collaborating closely across teams.

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application.  These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. AI helped us write this job advert! However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.