Senior Program Manager - Education
CEGIS Foundation
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Job summary
CEGIS Foundation is looking for a Senior Program Manager – Education to lead its education initiatives in Telangana. This leadership role focuses on government partnership, project execution, and team management. The successful candidate will drive government engagement and ensure high-quality project outputs for educational improvements.
The position requires strong communication abilities, strategic thinking, and a commitment to enhancing the effectiveness of state governance. Located in Hyderabad, this role involves collaboration with senior officials and team leadership.
Qualifications
- 9 to 12 years of relevant experience in management, consulting, or government partnerships.
- Proven experience in building relationships with senior government officials.
- Experience leading and mentoring multi-disciplinary teams in the development sector.
Responsibilities
- Serve as CEGIS's primary representative with senior officials of the Telangana School Education Department.
- Oversee the design and implementation of education projects.
- Lead, mentor, and manage a multidisciplinary team.
Skills
Education
Job description
The Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS – pronounced See-Jis) aims to improve lives by helping Indian state governments deliver better development outcomes. We believe that the most impactful lever for accelerating national development is to improve governance and state capacity to better deliver core public services at scale.
Informed by cutting‑edge research and evidence as well as a practical orientation toward implementable ideas, CEGIS works with state governments in India to enable a transformative improvement in their functioning. CEGIS's vision and Theory of Change (ToC) are an outcome of extensive research done by Prof. Karthik Muralidharan (CEGIS Co‑Founder and Scientific Director) and outlined in his multiple award‑winning, national bestselling book Accelerating India's Development, and enabled by strategic philanthropic support provided by Ashish Dhawan (CEGIS Co‑Founder).
CEGIS Approach and Model of Functioning:
CEGIS' solutions to enhance governance are co‑created with state governments in a state‑led way, where we focus on deep partnerships with states using an iterative cycle of think‑demonstrate‑document‑transfer. We work closely with the top bureaucratic leadership, front‑line workers and public officials in Finance, Planning, Human Resources and a few other priority line departments. Many of our solutions reflect ideas outlined in the book Accelerating India's Development, and these solutions are constantly refined based on real‑time feedback and are designed to both be customized to the contexts we are working in, and to create templates that can provide the starting point for replication across contexts.
Our focus areas reflect evidence that key characteristics of high‑performing organisations include (a) measuring outcomes through reliable, high quality data that enables goal setting and progress monitoring; (b) strategic use of personnel – competency‑based hiring and training, skilling, and performance appraisals to determine job assignments, pay, and promotions – to achieve the goals above; (c) strategic budgeting where resource allocation and revenue collection are based on evidence and cost‑effectiveness; (d) and creating efficient systems to leverage external actors (including for‑profit and nonprofit organisations). CEGIS partners with states to improve capacity by focusing on these pillars of State effectiveness, and aims to also integrate these horizontal governance improvements into integrated sectoral roadmaps to accelerate the achievement of state and national development outcomes.
Internally, CEGIS is organized into solutions teams that lead the design and technical quality control of our research and evidence‑backed approaches to improving governance and state capacity; delivery teams that lead state‑facing work to contextualise the solutions, and support governments in implementing them; and enablement teams that enable the organization to function smoothly.
CEGIS@6 to CEGIS@10: Building on momentum to catalyse national development
Since its incorporation in 2019, CEGIS has gained significant momentum in building strong collaborations with state government(s) as a trusted partner who can provide both thought leadership and implementation support on key governance reforms. CEGIS position as a non‑profit that does not take any funding from the government (other than in‑kind contributions of office space/staff) has been a key enabler in earning this trust.
Beginning with 1 state government engagement in 2019, today CEGIS is working across 9 Indian states (Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh). We also partner with union agencies/ministries such as Capacity Building Commission, Ministry of Women & Child Development (MoWCD), and Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to share insights from our state‑level work to inform national‑level guidelines and dissemination to other states. Finally, we also take on selected work at the district level to design and test implementation templates.
From a small group of founding members, we have grown to become a team of 150+ members located across the country, and expect to grow to over 200 in the coming year. Led by a former senior civil‑servant with deep governance experience; state and solution team leads with decades of domain expertise; and enabling functions led by professionals with considerable corporate experience, the team at CEGIS brings together knowledge and experience that spans various sectors – from development economics, research, governance, management consulting, and social entrepreneurship.
Over the last 6 years, CEGIS has also garnered support for our vision and theory of change from several foundations and philanthropists whose partnership has enabled us to build our organisational capacity as well as continue to experiment and improve our solution design to augment state capacity and governance. With the rapidly growing demand for CEGIS's offerings, CEGIS is well‑positioned to play a key role in accelerating India's development.
To explore what the mission of CEGIS is and the impact we hope to have, please take a look at this video of our CEO, Dr Vijay Pingale.
The Senior Program Manager – Education, Telangana will serve as CEGIS's primary engagement point for its education portfolio in the state. This is a senior leadership role that combines strategic government partnership, project execution, and team management.
The incumbent will serve as the primary relationship manager, while ensuring institutional continuity of government partnerships across the CEGIS team.
The role requires an experienced professional who can operate credibly at the senior levels of a state government, translate complex analytical work into implementable governance solutions, and build and mentor a high‑performing embedded team—while being supported by the Education Lead, State Lead and CEGIS's technical functions.
Government Engagement & Strategic Partnership
Serve as CEGIS's primary representative with senior officials of the Telangana School Education Department Leadership.
Build and sustain trusted, high‑quality relationships with government counterparts; represent CEGIS effectively in high‑level reviews, policy consultations, and decision‑making forums.
Drive the government engagement agenda—identify priority areas for collaboration, facilitate strategic discussions, and support agenda‑setting with senior leadership.
Accountable for influencing and enabling programme outcomes through strong partnerships and execution excellence.
Strategy & Theory of Change
Champion CEGIS's theory of change across all education projects in Telangana; ensure that every workstream reflects CEGIS's core approach of evidence‑data‑backed.
Co‑create and continuously refine project strategy with the state government, anchoring it in an understanding of the Telangana education system's specific context and constraints.
Identify systemic bottlenecks, surface opportunities for intervention, and bring cross‑state learnings to strengthen project design.
Define and monitor indicators of success at the programme level; ensure projects are oriented towards measurable improvements in learning and governance outcomes.
Project Design & Implementation
Oversee the design and end‑to‑end implementation of education projects, including workstreams related to foundational learning, teacher professional development, academic monitoring, data systems, and capacity building.
Structure complex problems, synthesise hypotheses, and develop appropriate analytical frameworks in collaboration with CEGIS technical functions and senior academics.
Ensure timely delivery of high‑quality project outputs, applying CEGIS‑wide protocols for data management, data protection, and project management.
Conduct quality control over field and desk research, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and all deliverables produced by the team.
Data, Evidence & Decision Support
Enable evidence‑based decision‑making by ensuring robust data collection, analysis, and reporting across all projects.
Set up and strengthen monitoring mechanisms, dashboards, and feedback loops that help government counterparts track implementation progress in real‑time.
Translate technical rigor into actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations for government stakeholders.
Proactively identify project risks and implementation bottlenecks; communicate upward with timely, suggestive remedies.
Team Leadership & Operations
Lead, mentor, and manage a multidisciplinary team embedded in or closely partnering with the Telangana education department.
Support reportees in planning and prioritising workstreams, setting timelines, and meeting deliverables; provide substantive intellectual and professional development support.
Ensure the team operates in alignment with CEGIS's values and protocols, including data ethics, quality standards, and stakeholder engagement norms.
Draft and review high‑quality written outputs—strategy notes, policy briefs, presentations, analytical reports, and government‑facing documents.
- Degree or equivalent in public policy, economics, management, engineering, social sciences, or a related field from a reputed institution.
- Experience: 9 to 12 years of relevant experience in one or more of the following:
- Management or strategy or impact consulting, with significant development sector exposure or in leading government‑facing partnerships for private or non‑profit organisations.
- Programme leadership roles with government advisory entities, multilateral organisations, international development institutions, or strategic philanthropy organisations.
- Demonstrated track record of building and sustaining productive working relationships with senior officials in Indian state governments.
- Proven experience leading and mentoring multi‑disciplinary teams in a fast‑paced, complex programme environment.
- Experience in the education sector is preferred; strong candidates from other social sector domains are also encouraged to apply.
Exceptional stakeholder management: able to engage credibly and confidently with senior bureaucrats and build durable, trust‑based relationships.
Strategic and systems thinking: ability to understand complex government systems, identify leverage points, and develop solutions that are both analytically rigorous and implementable.
Strong analytical skills: comfort with quantitative and qualitative data, research methods, and translating evidence into governance recommendations.
Outstanding written and verbal communication in English; ability to tailor communication for diverse audiences including government officials, academics, and internal leadership.
Basic to intermediate proficiency in Telugu; ability to navigate working contexts where Telugu is the primary language of communication.
Execution orientation: ability to manage multiple workstreams, set priorities, meet deadlines, and deliver high‑quality outputs under pressure.
Team leadership: ability to inspire, develop, and hold accountable a diverse team while maintaining a collaborative and supportive working environment.
Adaptability and creativity: comfortable with ambiguity, willing to experiment with new approaches, and able to pivot as project contexts evolve.
Deep commitment to improving the effectiveness of Indian state governments and alignment with CEGIS's mission and theory of change.
High degree of personal ownership and accountability; proactive in identifying and solving problems.
Ability to work under pressure by handling competing priorities.
Collaborative working style that values and actively incorporates diverse perspectives.
Comfortable operating in a small‑organisation environment where resourcefulness, agility, and initiative are essential.
Ability to hold firm on quality standards while remaining pragmatic and solution‑oriented in the face of real‑world implementation constraints.
This role is based in Hyderabad, Telangana, with regular travel to districts across the state and occasional travel to CEGIS offices as needed.
Please go through the following materials before sending in your application:
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