Portfolio and Platform Lead, MNCNH Artificial Intelligence (*3-Year LTE)

The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team

The MNCNH team works to eliminate preventable mortality and morbidity among women, newborns, and children in low-resource settings. We do this by funding and accelerating a portfolio of high-impact products targeted at the moments of greatest biological vulnerability across the life-course. Our portfolio addresses pregnancy risk, maternal undernutrition, prematurity, neonatal encephalopathy, child wasting, neurodevelopment, and maternal morbidity through drugs, foods, microbes, devices, risk algorithms, and increasingly through AI and connected device technologies that extend the reach of these interventions where health systems are weakest.

The Division

The Gender Equality Division’s mission is to ensure women and girls in Africa and South Asia can enjoy good health, make their own choices, earn their own money, and be leaders in their societies. When women and girls have an equal chance to thrive and lead, everyone benefits. We know that women and girls are not a monolith. A woman’s experience and the barriers she faces are different depending on factors like where she lives, how old she is, and how much money her family has, alongside other factors including her race, caste, and education level. We seek to address these compounding barriers through deep partnership with our grantees. As a philanthropy, our role is to listen to and learn from these experts. We take risks in new areas, prove concepts, and bring these ideas to governments, partner organizations, and private sector companies to scale.

Your Role

The Portfolio and Platform Lead will play a central role in managing the lifecycle of MNCNH’s AI projects, from proof-of-concept to regional or national scale across maternal, newborn, and child health programs. This individual will bridge the gap between product development and operational implementation, ensuring AI initiatives are both technically sound and scalable in the antenatal, intrapartum, postnatal, and early-childhood care settings where MNCNH operates. You will provide centralized oversight of the MNCNH AI portfolio, including the grants and investments that deliver it, ensuring projects move efficiently through development, adoption, and scale-up phases in coordination with the foundation-wide AI Steering Committee. You will coordinate with internal MNCNH technical leads, country teams, grantees, and external partners to optimize resources and maximize impact on maternal and child outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Portfolio and Product Management
  • Manage AI projects and supporting grants/contracts from concept through scale.
  • Build frameworks to track timelines, budgets, milestones, and grant performance.
  • Audit project readiness at each stage and inform follow-on investment decisions.
  • Identify and address product bottlenecks across the portfolio.
  • Keep the portfolio aligned to the MNCNH Clinical Decision Support and Patient Self-Care AI Strategy.
  • Serve as a technical thought partner to grantees, helping them hit milestones, course correct, and connect to the broader AI portfolio.
• User Experience And Product Design
  • Embed human-centered design so tools reflect the workflows, literacy levels, and constraints of frontline cadres in LMIC settings.
  • Identify usability gaps (interface, accessibility, low-bandwidth performance) and drive fixes with partners and grantees.
  • Commission and synthesize user research to inform portfolio priorities and partner expectations.
  • Set portfolio-wide design standards covering trust indicators, error handling, explainability, and workflow integration.
• Stakeholder Coordination and Strategy
  • Align product strategies with organizational goals across AI teams, grant managers, grantees, and external partners.
  • Build relationships with ministries of health, country MNCH programs, multilateral partners, peer funders, and implementers to support AI adoption in service delivery.
  • Develop AI product introduction strategies that reflect operational realities in LMIC contexts.
  • Organize and facilitate partner convenings to share learning, align on standards, and surface cross-cutting opportunities and risks.
• Scales and Resource Optimization
  • Identify high-potential AI initiatives (risk-stratification algorithms, clinical decision support, and diagnostics for low-resource settings) and guide them through the maturity pipeline.
  • Identify barriers to scale and connect products to the enablers needed for adoption.
  • Define and enforce integration standards so products connect with existing health information systems (DHIS2, OpenMRS, national HMIS, and MNCH registries such as antenatal care, immunization, and birth/death notification) rather than operating as point solutions.
  • Oversee API design and data exchange to ensure interoperability with FHIR-compliant systems, national registries, and partner platforms.
  • Identify and mitigate integration failure modes (data pipeline fragility, authentication friction, workflow disruption, and alert fatigue) that drive low uptake.
  • Maintain an integration landscape map tracking which products are embedded in MNCH care-continuum workflows and drive a strategy to close the gaps.
• Deliverables
  • AI Project Roadmap, Timelines & Dashboards.
  • Central tracker for prioritized AI initiatives and their grants.
  • Anual Portfolio Performance Report.
  • Scaling Readiness Framework.
  • Stakeholder Engagement Plan.
  • UX & Design Standards Playbook.
  • Integration Landscape Map.
  • Data Access Agreements with Grantees.
  • Partner & Grantee AI Enablement.

Your Experience

• Advanced degree in biotech, pharmaceutical, or life sciences, or equivalent.
• 8+ years of experience managing AI, digital, or technology product portfolios, ideally in a commercial setting, with demonstrated experience managing grants, contracts, or comparable investment vehicles.
• Strong understanding of AI product development, evaluation, and adoption, including the product-layer factors (usability, integration, trust design) that determine whether capable models translate into real-world uptake.
• Experience in structuring and managing AI projects, tracking deliverables, and managing cross-functional teams and grantees.
• Ability to engage with governments, donors, peer funders, and implementing partners to drive AI adoption, with familiarity in engaging tech firms.
• Strong analytical skills to assess project and grant performance and resource allocation.

Other Attributes

• Familiarity with the challenges of scaling AI and digital health solutions in MNCH programs in LMIC contexts strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated experience embedding human-centered design or UX practice into digital health or AI product development, with the ability to commission and act on user research and to hold development partners and grantees accountable to design quality standards.
• Working knowledge of health system integration standards and architectures (FHIR, HL7, DHIS2, OpenMRS) and experience driving interoperability requirements with technical teams and implementation partners.
• Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located.

Hiring Requirements

• As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.
• Candidate Accommodations: We’re committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview process—such as an ASL interpreter, alternative interview format, or physical accessibility support—we’re happy to help. Please contact HR@gatesfoundation.org with the position number and a brief description of your accommodation needs.
• Requests will be handled confidentially.
• Inclusion Statement: We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices. All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.