Head of AI & Program Technology Engineering

About the role

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is one of the world’s largest international humanitarian non-governmental organizations, at work in more than 40 countries and 29 U.S. cities. We are hiring a Head of AI Engineering to lead the technical team that builds AI-powered systems for humanitarian impact and to help shape what we build next.

You will own

• Technical strategy and direction for IRC’s program-facing AI portfolio, including a clear technical roadmap, build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions, and architectural direction for systems that must work reliably in some of the hardest operating environments on earth (offline on low-cost smartphones, agentic systems with high safety standards, diagnostic models trained on under-represented populations).
• A high-performing engineering team, managing and growing engineers, applied AI engineers, and QA specialists; raising engineering quality; and building a culture that attracts top technical talent to mission-driven work.
• Deep partnerships with program leaders and strategic partners, co-designing solutions with health, education, protection, resettlement, and emergency response experts and maximizing value from flagship partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and other frontier labs.

Major responsibilities

AI Strategic Leadership

• Translate IRC’s AI strategy and program priorities into a prioritized technical roadmap in close partnership with program leaders, the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture, and the T4P demand pipeline.
• Stay at the edge of AI/ML advances—particularly in agentic systems, multimodal models, and edge/on-device inference—and bring promising approaches to IRC’s programs.
• Serve as a core member of IRC’s AI leadership, helping shape organizational direction alongside senior leaders.
• Champion responsible, human-centered AI deployment in sensitive humanitarian contexts with the safety standards those contexts demand.
• Represent IRC in technical discussions with partners, peer organizations, donors, and the broader humanitarian and AI sectors.

Team Leadership and Management

• Manage and develop a team of engineers, applied AI engineers, and QA specialists; hire well, raise the bar, and build a culture that strong technical people want to join.
• Establish engineering quality standards, development practices, and documentation protocols.
• Maintain a prioritized backlog of program innovations and manage team capacity against demand.
• Mature the team’s AI development and DevOps practices and grow stakeholder buy-in across the organization.
• Identify opportunities to secure budget resources in support of innovation priorities.

Cross-functional Partnership

• Act as a genuine thought partner to program leaders—bringing AI fluency to their problems and humility about field realities.
• Co-design solutions that work in the field, not technology-first answers in search of problems.
• Partner with the Enterprise Applications team to ensure smooth handoffs of proven innovations for enterprise-wide scale-up.
• Coordinate with the Enterprise Applications DevOps team on integration touchpoints, infrastructure dependencies, and shared engineering standards.

Flagship AI Partnerships

• Serve as the technical lead on IRC’s strategic partnerships with frontier AI organizations, turning early relationships into long-term, high-leverage collaborations.
• Identify where partnership access (compute, frontier models, technical expertise) can unlock outsized program impact.

Solution Design and Engineering

• Lead the design and development of AI-driven, program-specific technology solutions, owning the full development lifecycle from requirements through handoff.
• Interface with program and business stakeholders to gather requirements, define technical solutions, and recommend approaches grounded in program goals.
• Design and oversee high-availability architectures in Microsoft Azure, incorporating redundancy, security, backup, and recovery strategies for sensitive humanitarian data.
• Research and recommend technology products, services, and standards—particularly in AI/ML—to support procurement, development, and strategic decision-making.

DevOps and Engineering Operations

• Oversee deployment pipelines, CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, and QA processes to ensure efficient and reliable software delivery.
• Ensure ongoing availability and performance of applications through monitoring, scaling, and proactive operations management.
• Track and optimize cloud and model-inference costs.
• Maintain technical and policy documentation for all assets under the team’s management.

Key working relationships

• Reports to: Chief Information Officer, working in close partnership with the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture
• Directly supervises: Engineers, applied AI engineers, ML specialists, and QA staff on the T4P Development team
• Other internal contacts: Program leaders across CRRD, RAI, R&I, and Signpost; the Enterprise Applications and DevOps teams; the AI governance and policy team; AI@Scale leadership; IT leadership across regions and HQ
• External contacts: Strategic partners with leading AI organizations; technology vendors; AI sector peers; NGO tech community; major foundation funders

Job requirements

AI and engineering depth

• Hands-on experience building and shipping production AI systems—agentic frameworks, LLM applications, RAG systems, computer vision, or applied ML pipelines.
• Solid full-stack foundation (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks) with the technical credibility to engage directly with engineers on architecture and design decisions.
• Experience with cloud architecture (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP transferable), including AI services, DevOps pipelines, and cost-effective scaling.
• Working knowledge of data security and privacy practices for sensitive or personally identifiable information.

Leadership and collaboration

• 7–10+ years in software engineering or technical product development, with 3+ years leading engineers as a manager or tech lead.
• A track record of building or growing strong engineering teams—hiring, raising the bar, and creating a culture people want to be part of.
• Ability to engage non-technical leaders as a peer: explaining trade-offs clearly, listening well, and translating between worlds.
• Comfort operating across global teams, time zones, and contexts very different from your own.

Mindset

• Genuinely motivated by humanitarian impact.
• Leads with humility; deep respect for the people closest to the problem, including those without technical backgrounds.
• Technically curious and forward-looking—reads, experiments, and brings new ideas to the team.

Nice to have

• Experience deploying AI in low-resource, low-bandwidth, or offline contexts.
• Prior work with humanitarian, development, or global health organizations.
• French or Arabic language skills.

Working environment

Standard office work environment; hybrid/remote available. Some travel may be required for partner meetings, field engagement, and sector conferences.

Compensation

• US Pay Rate: $185,000–$200,000
• UK Pay Rate: £87,000–£100,000

Ranges are based on various factors including the labor market, job type, internal equity, and budget. Exact offers are calibrated by work location, individual candidate experience and skills relative to the defined job requirements.