Responsibilities
- Own and maintain the Compass project plan, tracking progress against milestones, decision gates, and budget across all three phases (Months 1–12).
- Lead preparation for each steering committee decision gate, assembling evidence, lessons learned, and go/no-go recommendations.
- Coordinate day-to-day workstreams across Mercy Corps, Save the Children, and CARE, ensuring aligned timelines and accountability.
- Manage the MVP contract build (Months 4–9), including vendor scoping, procurement support, sprint planning, and delivery oversight.
- Ensure budget tracking and financial reporting in coordination with Mercy Corps Finance and consortium partners.
- Lead Phase 1 for technical validation and validate core assumptions before committing to the Phase 2 build.
- Define product requirements and user stories for the MVP in close collaboration with field staff and program teams.
- Oversee integration of the Compass technology with existing humanitarian data collection workflows (e.g., CommCare, KoBoToolbox, OpenFn).
- Ensure the MVP meets standards for usability, offline functionality, and contextual fit for low-resource field environments.
- Supervise development and provide technical direction to the contracted development team.
- Lead design of the community consent framework, ensuring explanation of data use—including potential AI training applications—is available in participants’ native language prior to any data collection.
- Develop and publish an open-source data ethics and governance framework covering consent, storage, anonymization, and community benefit commitments, available for adoption by any organization.
- Ensure voice data collection meets minimum thresholds for speaker diversity (age, gender, geography, educational background) as specified in the pilot design.
- Identify and support engagement with NLP research actors as collaborators from project inception.
- Coordinate country pilot logistics across 2–3 Impact Alliance organizations in a single country context during Months 9–11.
- Support identification and engagement of pilot country teams and community partners; build local ownership into the pilot design from the outset.
- Design and manage monitoring and evaluation processes to track MVP impact, friction points, risks, and outcomes across the country pilot.
- Lead learning reviews and after-action analyses at each phase transition to distill best practices and inform the scaling roadmap.
- Produce a validated voice dataset, an open-source technical framework, and a 1–3 year product roadmap for steering committee review at project close.
- Contribute to thought leadership and sector representation on ambient voice technology and low-resource language AI on behalf of the Impact Alliance.
Requirements
- Technical depth with field-grounded pragmatism.
- Energized by the complexity of getting emerging technology to work in real humanitarian conditions—not a controlled lab.
- Hold ambiguity well during scoping phases, make evidence-based decisions at each gate, and build trust across diverse stakeholders including community members, field workers, technologists, and donors.
- Do not hesitate to seek clarification and assistance when needed and are able to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
- Genuine commitment to equitable AI: ensuring that communities whose voices contribute to the dataset understand and consent to that use, and that the resulting data serves them—not just the organizations collecting it.
Additional Information
- The position is remote / home-based and requires up to 20% travel to support country programs, which may include travel to insecure locations where freedom of movement is limited and amenities are limited.
- In support of our belief that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities we serve, we empower all team members to dedicate 5% of their time to learning activities that further their personal and/or professional growth and development.
