WASH Technical Advisor, Operations and Maintenance

Role Overview

Splash is moving beyond installing school water and sanitation infrastructure into the harder problem of keeping it running every day. This manager-level role owns the operational machinery behind that shift — the maintenance routines, funding arrangements, service contracts, and accountability structures that let schools, providers, utilities, and governments keep facilities working long after construction crews leave. The advisor operates simultaneously at the systems level with ministries and utilities, at the service level with maintenance providers and supply chains, and at the school level where daily reliability is actually won or lost, starting with programs in Ethiopia, Zambia, and Malawi and generating lessons for future cities.

Key Responsibilities

• Translate Splash's global O&M strategy into country workplans, decision gates, action plans, and phase-specific guidance covering pilot, delivery, and exit.
• Partner with country-based technical staff to track O&M readiness across school cohorts, service providers, utilities, and government counterparts, adjusting the approach as implementation evidence accumulates.
• Support national and sub-national financing conversations about ongoing operating costs, including OPEX commitments and clear matrices showing who performs each task and who pays for it.
• Build reusable templates for O&M roles, budgets, decision rights, escalation routes, and handover conditions, and verify that government and school-level commitments are documented, actionable, and aligned with exit criteria before handover.
• Identify and prioritize O&M partners — maintenance providers, utilities, technical partners, local implementers — and move global conversations into agreements covering scope, service levels, roles, and costs; manage those relationships and escalate delivery or performance problems.
• Help country teams develop service agreements and contracts that spell out responsibilities, performance expectations, and handover conditions.
• Design service models spanning preventive, scheduled, and reactive maintenance, and equip country offices with SOPs, maintenance schedules, and tools for measuring service-provider performance.
• Assess supply chain needs — particularly spare-parts availability, supplier reliability, and procurement standards — and strengthen local workforce capacity through mentoring, handover documentation, peer learning, and support structures that can survive without Splash.
• Collaborate with the Impact team on lean monitoring of infrastructure functionality, repair response times, and provider performance, and work across program, infrastructure, finance, procurement, and country teams so O&M is designed into projects rather than treated as a post-construction afterthought.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Seven or more years of experience in WASH, infrastructure sustainability, municipal service delivery, public systems strengthening, operations and maintenance, or utilities.
• Demonstrated success managing complex workstreams that span government counterparts, local partners, service providers, and technical teams.
• Solid grounding in O&M systems: preventive and reactive maintenance, lifecycle costing, service standards, and handover planning.
• A track record of developing tools, SOPs, workplans, dashboards, or implementation frameworks that help distributed teams execute consistently.
• Excellent writing and facilitation ability, with the skill to make systems-level concepts practical for audiences of varying technical backgrounds.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience required; experience in East or Southern Africa, school WASH, or performance-based contracting is strongly preferred.

The strongest candidates will be practical systems thinkers who enjoy converting strategy into usable tools, routines, and decisions. You should be comfortable bringing structure to ambiguous situations, building models that partners can eventually own themselves, and moving between technical, financial, and government-facing conversations without losing sight of what a school needs on a Tuesday morning. Managing several moving pieces independently, across cultures, time zones, and seniority levels, is central to the job — as is contributing to a workplace culture that pairs genuine seriousness about the mission with a playful spirit.

What We Offer / Why Join

• Compensation and benefits vary by country and are set according to the location of the successful candidate and their experience.
• Flexible work schedules across time zones: team members set standard hours within their own time zone while remaining available for occasional off-hours work, balanced by a self-managed schedule that allows personal time.
• For US-based employees: 18 days of paid time off, increasing by two days each year up to 28 days, plus 11 paid holidays and Wellness Fridays with reduced hours.
• Two additional weeks of paid time off each year — one during the July 4th week and one during the final week of the year.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, and a 401(k) plan with a 3% match.