Technical Program Manager, Emergency Cash

Role Overview

This position sits inside GiveDirectly’s Emergency Cash team, where technology determines how quickly crisis-affected people can receive cash assistance. You will design, configure, and run the systems that power each response—data collection, identity verification, digital payments, and monitoring—so they remain stable, secure, and quick to activate when an emergency hits. Day-to-day work shifts between hands-on technical delivery during deployments and deliberate preparation between them: sharpening playbooks, spotting weaknesses in current tools, and turning field experience into product improvements that make the next response faster.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end technical program delivery for emergency cash responses, including scoping, requirements gathering, system configuration, integration, QA, live troubleshooting, and formal closeout.
• Act as the bridge between response teams and technical counterparts: translate field priorities into clear requirements, coordinate with Product, Engineering, Research, Data, Payments, and Programs, and keep systems aligned with programmatic goals and real-world conditions.
• Build and maintain deployment guides, technical documentation, and incident-response protocols so future activations follow predictable, repeatable procedures.
• Design and deliver technical training and onboarding for surge staff, collaborators, and local partners ahead of and during emergency deployments.
• Track readiness and reliability metrics—system uptime, deployment speed, integration failures, data quality, testing coverage—and provide regular reports that inform decision-making.
• Facilitate technical retrospectives, lessons-learned reviews, and root-cause analyses after each response; consolidate findings into actionable recommendations and product roadmap inputs.
• Proactively assess technical risks in high-risk operating environments, including poor connectivity, data loss, device theft, fraud, and system misuse, and implement safeguards before and during activations.
• Evaluate and pilot new products, tools, and integrations that could strengthen the team's emergency-response capability, documenting results and advising on adoption.

Requirements & Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in one or more of the following areas: technical program management, product management, software engineering, data analytics, international development, emergency response, or management consulting.
• Demonstrated experience managing complex deliverables across multiple workstreams, balancing stakeholder expectations, operational risk, and tight timelines.
• Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where clear precedent does not exist, and the ability to make sound judgment calls that balance speed, risk, and quality.
• Experience owning technical decisions without a predefined playbook, including assessing new technologies, system designs, and trade-offs.
• Working proficiency in at least one programming or statistical language (Python, R, MATLAB, Java, Apex) sufficient to build automation and business logic; this is not an engineering or data science role.
• Strong analytical instincts: willing to validate data and code creatively, check assumptions, find edge cases, and pursue root causes rather than surface fixes.
• Exceptional ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, including colleagues and partners from varied cultural, national, and social backgrounds.
• Full professional fluency in English.
• Preferred—not required: experience with relational databases or SQL; experience with data visualization tools; prior work in humanitarian or emergency-response settings; familiarity with humanitarian coordination systems (for example, UN clusters or INGO networks) and donor expectations.

What We Offer / Why Join

You will join a remote-first team built around trust, ownership, and flexibility, with a culture that assumes you will manage your own time and communicate proactively. Because emergency response is unpredictable, this role includes surge capacity and occasional work across multiple time zones following a pre-established on-call schedule. The work offers an unusual degree of ownership: you will help shape how humanitarian programs integrate technology, and you will see the direct impact of your contributions in faster, more reliable cash assistance for people in crisis.