About this role
The International Rescue Committee seeks a senior technical leader to direct engineering for program-facing AI systems used in humanitarian settings. The team builds agentic systems, predictive analytics and AI diagnostics for low-resource, high-stakes environments, including applications that may need to operate offline on low-cost smartphones. The role reports to the Chief Information Officer and works closely with the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture.
Responsibilities
- Turn program priorities into a technical roadmap; make build-versus-buy-versus-partner decisions and set architecture for reliable, safe AI systems. Assess advances in agentic systems, multimodal models and on-device inference, while championing responsible, human-centered deployment.
- Hire, manage and develop engineers, applied AI engineers, ML specialists and QA staff. Set engineering, development and documentation standards; prioritize the innovation backlog, manage capacity and help secure resources.
- Co-design solutions with leaders in health, education, protection, resettlement and emergency response. Lead development from requirements through handoff, coordinate integration and scale-up with Enterprise Applications and DevOps teams, and serve as technical lead for partnerships with frontier AI organizations, including Anthropic and OpenAI.
- Oversee high-availability Azure architecture, including redundancy, security, backup and recovery for sensitive data. Manage deployment pipelines, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, QA, monitoring, application performance, and cloud and model-inference costs.
Candidate profile: Strong candidates will bring most, not necessarily all, of the listed qualifications: 7–10+ years in software engineering or technical product development, including 3+ years leading engineers as a manager or tech lead; experience shipping production AI systems such as agentic frameworks, LLM applications, RAG, computer vision or applied ML pipelines; a full-stack foundation in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript and modern frameworks; cloud architecture experience, preferably Azure, with AWS or GCP transferable; and knowledge of security and privacy for sensitive or personally identifiable information. Team-building, communication with nontechnical leaders and collaboration across global teams are important. Preferred qualifications include AI deployment in low-resource, low-bandwidth or offline settings; humanitarian, development or global health experience; and French or Arabic.
The posting lists New York, Nairobi and London locations and labels the role fully remote; it also says hybrid/remote work is available. Some travel may be required. Listed pay ranges are 185,000–200,000 USD in the US and 87,000–100,000 GBP in the UK, with offers calibrated by work location, experience and skills.