Roles · Data & Research
Head of Research
Latin America will spend this decade deciding whether it builds frontier AI capability or rents it. The region holds the energy, the minerals, the data, and the talent of 660 million people, and almost none of the compute, the models, or the governance leverage. Futuros exists to change that.
Futuros is the evidence platform for that argument: a live, cited, trilingual observatory of 25 countries built to put verifiable numbers in front of heads of state, CELAC, the IDB, CAF, ECLAC, and the private sector. Every claim on the platform resolves to a source, and the platform is in production today.
Platform in early access for partners and funders. We will walk you through it live during the process.
The role
The Head of Research owns what the platform is allowed to claim. Methodology, evidence standards, and the research agenda across ten sectoral pillars. When a president's office or an IDB economist challenges a number, this role is why the number survives the challenge.
What you'll do
- Own methodology. Composite indices, goalpost scoring, convergence analysis, forecast framing. Every method documented, versioned, and defensible in front of a technical audience.
- Set the evidence standard. Source hierarchies, assumption tagging, and the discipline that every projection shows its base rate. No aspirational claims without a model or a peer benchmark.
- Direct the research agenda. Country and sector coverage across the ten pillars, peer-initiative benchmarking, and the deep dives that feed briefings and pilots.
- Review pilot economics. Costing, discount rates, and bankability analysis with the pilot team; the numbers behind a pilot must survive a development-bank credit committee.
- Hunt bad numbers. Audit for fabricated freshness, mislabeled series, and composites that lie. Publish corrections when we are wrong.
- Defend the work. Represent the methodology to ECLAC, IDB, and CAF technical staff, and to the academics who will try to break it.
What we're looking for
- Quantitative depth. An economist or quantitative social scientist with real statistics: measurement error, index construction, causal inference and its limits.
- Applied policy work. You have produced analysis that governments or multilaterals actually used, ideally in Latin America.
- Code literacy. You can read a pipeline and audit what it does to the data; Python or R fluency.
- Professional working Spanish. The sources and the counterparts operate in Spanish.
- Founding temperament. You are comfortable owning ambiguous problems with no one above you to escalate to.
Nice to have
- Portuguese.
- Time inside ECLAC, IDB, CAF, a central bank, or a national statistics office.
- Published work on development, technology, or measurement.
- Experience directing research with AI tools and knowing when not to trust them.
How this works
This is a founding conversation. We are open on compensation, equity, and scope for the right fit, and we come to the table with strong institutional backing. We will be transparent about terms from the first call and expect the same directness back.
How to apply
Send a short note on your interest in the role, an example of what you've built that's aligned with the role, and why this is the dream role for you.
marcus@ladp.io