Senior Program Business Development Advisor

Overview

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people affected by conflict and disaster. IRC works in more than 40 countries and 29 U.S. cities to deliver lasting impact by restoring safety, dignity, and hope. The organization seeks solutions-driven, passionate change-makers to join and positively impact the lives of millions.

IRC’s Crisis Response, Recovery & Development department (CRRD) leads and delivers the IRCs work in crisis-affected contexts worldwide. In FY24, CRRD served over 36M crisis-affected people with high-quality humanitarian programming, supported by over 16,000 staff across 350 offices in nearly 40 countries, delivering more than 600 grants and contracts with an annual budget over $830M. The Awards Management Unit (AMU) within CRRD identifies, secures and manages all government-donor funding, serving as a bridge between donors and IRC field work.

AMU leads donor engagement, provides technical advice, ensures donor policy compliance, and supports staff working on awards. AMU manages a grants and contracts portfolio of about $750M over the past year, with total value over $1B.

The Senior Program/Business Development Advisor will join a global business development (BD) team to drive new business development efforts by engaging with global, regional, country, and technical staff throughout the BD cycle—from opportunity tracking and positioning/capture planning to proposal development and submission. The SPDA will primarily serve as capture and proposal manager and will offer technical assistance and mentor staff on relevant BD topics.

The ideal candidate will have significant high-level experience in managing capture and proposal development for complex or high-value opportunities, including donors such as UK FCDO, US Government, France (AFD), and multilateral organizations like the World Bank. A broad humanitarian and development BD experience with diverse institutional donors is an advantage.

Bid leadership and coordination (70%)

• Lead proposal development for complex and strategic public opportunities, including capture strategy, management of proposal teams, calendars and deadlines; strategy development with technical staff; consortium management and negotiations; recruiting; writing; production; and after-action reviews.
• Collaborate with regional, country, and technical teams to implement opportunity-specific long-term capture and positioning strategies.
• Lead strategic capture efforts for frameworks, single opportunities and wider funding sources, including donor mapping, SWOT analysis, support to win themes, and pre-positioning strategies.
• Strengthen IRC’s profile and relationships with key stakeholders (donors, peer organizations, local partners, government institutions) to support opportunity-specific strategic planning and decision-making.
• Advise Technical Teams and Country Teams on strategic approaches for funding opportunities, guiding a robust Go/No Go process.
• Support technical units and country teams to pitch to prospective partners to secure competitive consortia.
• Review and/or draft expressions of interest, concept notes, and proposals to ensure quality and donor compliance.
• Collaborate with IRC’s pricing team and other budget leads to ensure technical coherence and value for money in the cost proposal.
• Collaborate with Proposal Recruiters to identify candidates for key personnel on proposals.
• Organize and manage internal processes to submit competitive and compliant proposals.

Business Development process improvement and knowledge management (10%)

• Conduct After Action Reviews and capture learnings to disseminate across the organization.
• Contribute to and model the use of standard BD processes, tools, templates and information.
• May serve in a short-term mentor role to junior staff leading large bids for the first time.

Partnerships and Strategy (20%)

• Conduct landscape analyses to identify strategic partnerships in public donor markets, focusing on local partnerships.
• Draft high-quality positioning materials as…