Role:- Policy & Research Manager

Organisation: Change Engine

Location:- Gurugram

About Change Engine

Change Engine is an accelerator and ecosystem builder supporting founders working to solve India's most complex social challenges at scale. Our mission is to help build India's next 100 non-profit unicorns — organisations that meaningfully impact 1M+ people.

We do this through our high touch funded accelerator program for nonprofits. We also do cutting edge research on nonprofit entrepreneurship and ease of doing good. We published the first evidence-based playbook for building non-profit unicorns with a foreword from Prof. Tarun Khanna of Harvard Business School. Our series on ease of doing good identifies systemic barriers to scaling.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve worked with over 15 non-profits that have gone on to raise $2M+ other than our catalytic funding in a short period. We have also co-authored data driven research with our portfolio organisations to drive meaningful conversations in areas such cash transfers, foundational numeracy amongst others. Our research work has been covered in leading publications such as the Economic Times, Times of India, Mint, Pioneer, IDR amongst others.

Founding Team

We are a team of founders & builders with extensive experience scaling organisations.

Varun Aggarwal is an entrepreneur (Aspiring Minds, $100M+ exit), AI researcher (1500+ citations) and author (science, deeptech and children books). At Aspiring Minds, Varun built AI-led programming and speech assessments which were sold globally to Fortune 500 companies. Since exiting from Aspiring Minds, he has been engaged in mission-driven work for seeing India's socio-economic progress and Change Engine is central to his thesis.

Shubham is an IIT Delhi alum & previously co-founded a social impact startup backed by Y-Combinator. Prior to this, he has worked with clean-tech startups across India and Europe in product and management roles. Shailendra, an ISB alum,



is a senior product leader with experience building products at MakeMyTrip & Spinny.

Our advisors and cohort mentors include Luis Miranda (President, Indian School of Public Policy), Tanvi Bikhchandani (Entrepreneur & Philanthropist), Geeta Goel (ex- Country Director, MSDF), Raman Oberoi (ex-COO, CRISIL), Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja (ex-CEO, Central Square Foundation), and others.

About the role:

We are seeking a Policy and Research Manager to work closely with the founders to strengthen the policy vertical. You will help shape public discourse on scaling bottlenecks for nonprofits,, inform our advocacy efforts, help identify key levers to drive systemic change across areas such as gender equity, employment, education, and public sector innovation

Key responsibilities:

- Build out the reform agenda for nonprofits. Scope out opportunities that will make it easier for innovative social impact solutions to emerge & scale.
- Conduct research through surveys, stakeholder interviews and literature reviews to build the evidence base for reforms.
- Interface with government bodies such as Niti Aayog, Line ministries and state governments to advocate for and drive these reforms
- Help portfolio organisations produce high-quality, data-backed research: state-of-the-sector reports, policy briefs and white papers.
- Prepare background notes and policy briefs for policy roundtables, conferences, summits, workshops etc as needed.

Required Qualifications and Skills

- A Master’s degree in Economics, Public Policy, Law or a related field with 3+ years experience (must) or a Bachelor’s degree with 4+ years of relevant experience
- Should have strong analytical capability and mature thinking to determine appropriate policy recommendations
- Previous experience in relevant roles at NITI aayog, or with nonprofits where you have supported government departments is preferred.
- Proven research and report-writing skills – clear, rigorous and well edited.
- Comfortable with data: you can work with numbers and make them tell a story.
- Comfortable working in a lean startup workplace and operate with tight deadlines

📌 Policy & Research Manager (Gurugram)
🏢 Change Engine
📍 Gurugram