Assistant Director, Research Operations Management

About the role

The Assistant Director, Research Operations Management will lead and stabilise post-award research operations at NTU's CoHASS, which includes the schools ADM, SOH, SSS and WKWSCI, the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration and the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The role diagnoses operational issues, routes work to the right workstreams, balances workloads and designs service standards that harmonise legacy practices across units. It acts as the operational hub between Finance, HR, Legal and the Research Support Office (RSO) to ensure compliant, timely and consistent service delivery.

Key responsibilities

• Lead Team B's day-to-day: set weekly priorities, assign cases, monitor queue health and run weekly workload reviews
• Balance workloads by skill and case complexity, rotate high-risk queues and maintain a skills matrix and cross-training plan
• Run a single intake channel for operational exceptions, triage them by impact, urgency, compliance risk and effort, and route cases to Finance, HR, Legal, RSO or school admin with clear handover notes
• Track no-owner cases, resolve ownership within SLAs and keep an exception triage log with root cause tags
• Document the service scope, publish a service catalogue, design SLAs for key request types and build SOPs for repeatable workflows
• Harmonise legacy practices across schools into one set of operating rules and review SLA performance monthly
• Serve as the primary operational contact for Finance, HR, Legal and RSO, convene working sessions for multi-party exceptions and share a weekly operational risk and blocker summary
• Monitor queues for systemic risks, flag high-risk cases for early Legal/RSO review, keep an operational risk register and ensure audit-ready documentation
• Map current-state workflows, propose process improvements, standardise templates and pilot changes before scaling

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in business administration, finance, public administration or a related field (or equivalent professional experience in research administration)
• Minimum 5-7 years of progressive experience in research administration or research operations, with substantial post-award responsibility
• Demonstrated experience leading or supervising an operational team or workstream

Required skills

• Knowledge of the research funding lifecycle and post-award processes: award setup, budgeting, modifications, reporting, subawards and closeout
• Knowledge of sponsor regulations and policies affecting financial and operational management
• Proficiency in electronic research administration and financial systems (grants management systems, reporting tools) and data extraction for metrics