Head of AI & Program Technology Engineering

Role Overview

This is a senior technical leadership position for an engineer who wants to build at the frontier of applied AI where the consequences are real. You will lead a team that designs and ships AI systems used directly by humanitarian programs — agentic tools, predictive analytics, and diagnostic models — in settings where bandwidth is scarce, devices are cheap, and errors carry serious weight. The work matters because the populations these programs serve are precisely the ones mainstream datasets and mainstream product roadmaps tend to overlook.

Key Responsibilities

• Convert organizational AI ambitions and program priorities into a sequenced technical roadmap, making build-versus-buy-versus-partner calls and setting architectural direction for systems that must perform reliably in low-resource, high-stakes environments.
• Track and evaluate advances in agentic systems, multimodal models, and edge or on-device inference, then bring the techniques that genuinely fit into program-facing products.
• Recruit, manage, and develop a team of engineers, applied AI engineers, machine learning specialists, and QA staff — setting engineering quality standards, development practices, and documentation protocols while building a culture strong technical people want to stay in.
• Own the full delivery lifecycle for program-specific AI solutions: gathering requirements alongside program teams, defining the technical approach, developing and testing the system, and managing handoff.
• Design and oversee high-availability Azure architectures with appropriate redundancy, security, backup, and recovery provisions suited to sensitive humanitarian data.
• Direct engineering operations — deployment pipelines, CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, QA processes, monitoring, scaling, and active cost management for cloud infrastructure and model inference.
• Serve as technical lead on strategic relationships with frontier AI organizations, identifying where access to compute, frontier models, or researcher expertise can unlock disproportionate program impact.
• Operate as a genuine thought partner to program leaders across health, education, protection, resettlement, and emergency response — co-designing solutions rather than receiving specifications — while coordinating with enterprise applications and DevOps teams on integration points, shared standards, and scale-up handoffs.
• Maintain a prioritized backlog of program innovations, manage team capacity against demand, and identify opportunities to secure budget for innovation priorities.

Requirements & Qualifications

Strong candidates will bring most — though not necessarily all — of the following:

• Hands-on experience building and shipping production AI systems, such as agentic frameworks, LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation, computer vision, or applied ML pipelines.
• A solid full-stack foundation in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript with modern frameworks, plus enough technical credibility to engage engineers directly on architecture and design trade-offs.
• Cloud architecture experience — Azure preferred, with AWS or GCP experience transferable — covering AI services, DevOps pipelines, and cost-effective scaling.
• Working knowledge of data security and privacy practices for sensitive or personally identifiable information.
• 7–10+ years in software engineering or technical product development, including at least 3 years managing engineers or leading a technical team.
• A demonstrable record of building or growing engineering teams: hiring well, raising the quality bar, and creating a culture people want to be part of.
• The ability to work as a peer with non-technical leaders — explaining trade-offs plainly, listening carefully, and translating between technical and program worlds.
• Comfort operating across global teams, time zones, and contexts very different from your own.
• Nice to have: experience deploying AI in low-resource, low-bandwidth, or offline environments; prior work with humanitarian, development, or global health organizations; French or Arabic language skills.

Why Join

• Your work reaches people the major datasets ignore — diagnostic models, offline-capable tools, and agentic systems built for the hardest operating environments on earth rather than the easiest.
• Flagship partnerships with leading frontier AI labs give the team direct access to cutting-edge models, early features, and the researchers building them.
• You will shape organizational direction as part of the AI leadership group, working alongside the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture and the Chief Information Officer.
• The mandate is broad by design: a portfolio spanning health, education, protection, resettlement, and emergency response, with room to set standards for responsible, human-centered AI in sensitive contexts.