Head of AI & Program Technology Engineering

Job Overview

This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who wants to build at the frontier of applied AI in service of humanitarian impact. You will lead a team of engineers and AI specialists designing and shipping AI-powered, program-facing solutions — primarily agentic systems, predictive analytics, and AI diagnostics deployed in low-resource and high-stakes settings.

Major Responsibilities

• 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 the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture and other senior leaders.

• Champion responsible, human-centered AI deployment in some of the most sensitive humanitarian contexts in the world, 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 be part of.

• 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 the field realities.

• Co-design solutions that actually 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 — helping turn 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 and 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 a detailed understanding of program goals.

• Design and oversee high-availability architectures in Microsoft Azure, incorporating appropriate redundancy, security, backup, and recovery strategies — including 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.