Technology Director — Global Health (REMOTE ROLE)

Technology Modernization Delivery Leadership

• Own delivery of the program's AI innovation portfolio. The workstreams cover automated data-to-report production, natural-language data access, multilingual questionnaire design, field data quality, and new measurement approaches.
• Run the stage-gate process. Lead go/no-go reviews, and make and defend decisions to stop workstreams, publish what they learned, and reallocate their funding.
• Serve as the principal technical counterpart to the funder. Lead progress reporting and learning reviews. Communicate results candidly, including negative ones.
• Manage the innovation portfolio, schedule, and risks with the project manager, including inference and cloud operating costs.
• Coordinate across global development programs. Share successes, failures, and methods with technology partners to avoid duplicating work.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Act as technical lead and architect for a cluster of workstreams. Own their system design, write the design documents, and stay hands-on through prototyping and production.
• Define acceptance criteria before the work is judged. With survey experts, set the quantitative quality thresholds each tool must meet, and hold the team (and yourself) to them.
• Set architecture and standards across the portfolio: model selection and routing, privacy-preserving design, offline and low-connectivity deployment, and security.
• Set engineering practice for the team, including specification-driven development with agentic coding tools, evaluation-first delivery, code review, and testing.
• Protect data quality and comparability. Work with survey methodologists so that no innovation breaks the comparability of data across countries and over time.
• Oversee responsible AI, data governance, and ethics. Make sure the program meets ICF security standards, IRB requirements, and partner-country data sovereignty expectations.

Team Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead and mentor the program's technology team, including applied AI, software, ML, and platform engineers.
• Bridge technology and survey expertise. Make sure survey methodologists, statisticians, and field teams shape what gets built, and that engineers understand how surveys work.
• Work with national statistical offices and ministries of health, together with ICF's country engagement leads, to design tools that countries want and can run on their own.
• Share the program's results openly through public documentation, publications, and presentations at technical and global health conferences.
• Contribute to business growth efforts including proactive engagement with potential clients, preparation of white papers, and proposal development.

Minimum Required Experience

• Bachelors degree in IT, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience)
• Minimum 10 years of professional experience designing and delivering technology solutions, including hands-on architecture of multiple complex systems taken into production
• Minimum 5 years leading and mentoring software or data engineering teams to build products or deploy systems

Additional Required Skills and Experience

• A track record of architecting and delivering AI/ML or LLM-powered systems in production, and the ability to explain how their quality was measured and where they failed
• Experience leading a multi-workstream technology program for a foundation, donor, or government client, with accountability for budget and results
• Deep knowledge of system architecture, data pipelines, software development methods, and at least one major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud)
• Hands-on familiarity with agentic coding tools and specification-driven development, and experience setting how a team uses them
• U.S. citizenship is required by federal government contract