Artificial Intelligence (AI) Project Manager

Mercy Corps is a global humanitarian aid agency engaged in transitional environments that have experienced some sort of shock: natural disaster, economic collapse, or conflict. We are seeking an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Project Manager to lead the "Compass" project across its three phases. The project focuses on developing and piloting AI-driven ambient voice technology and speech-to-text systems for humanitarian data collection in low-resource environments. The role involves managing complex workstreams, overseeing the technical builds of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), and ensuring ethical data governance.### Key Responsibilities#### Program Delivery and Project Management* 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.#### Technical Implementation and Oversight* 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.#### Consent Architecture and Data Governance* 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.* Ensure voice data collection meets minimum thresholds for speaker diversity (age, gender, geography, educational background).#### Partnerships and Community Engagement* Identify and support engagement with NLP research actors as collaborators from project inception.* Coordinate country pilot logistics across 2–3 Impact Alliance organizations.* Support identification and engagement of pilot country teams and community partners; build local ownership into the pilot design.#### Learning and Impact* Design and manage monitoring and evaluation processes to track MVP impact, friction points, risks, and outcomes.* Lead learning reviews and after-action analyses at each phase transition to distill best practices.* Produce a validated voice dataset, an open-source technical framework, and a 1–3 year product roadmap.### Minimum Qualification & Transferable Skills* Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, International Development, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.* At least 5 years of relevant experience managing complex technology projects, ideally in humanitarian, development, or non-profit contexts.* Demonstrated experience with voice/audio technology, speech-to-text systems, NLP, or LLMs.* Experience shipping MVPs or digital products in low-resource or field environments; comfort managing external development contractors.* Familiarity with humanitarian data collection tools (CommCare, KoBoToolbox, ODK, OpenFn) and cloud data infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP).* Strong understanding of data ethics, community consent frameworks, and responsible AI principles.* Experience coordinating multi-stakeholder projects with competing priorities.* Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; fluency in English is required.### How to ApplyQualified candidates should apply online via the Mercy Corps application portal at https://www.myjobmag.co.ke/apply-now/1217057.