The Technical Lead – Digital Health will provide senior technical and system architectural leadership for the design, implementation, and scale-up of national and multi-country digital health systems. Working in close partnership with Ministries of Health, Software Engineering teams, and Country teams, this role will strive to ensure that digital health solutions are interoperable, secure, sustainable, and aligned with national health priorities and global best practices. The Technical Lead operates at the intersection of technology, public health, and policy, supporting governments and country teams to strengthen health information systems, enable data use for decision-making, and build resilient digital public infrastructure for health.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Technical & Architectural Leadership
- Define and steward the technical vision and architecture for digital health and health information systems for advisory across countries and programs.
- Ensure alignment with national digital health strategies, enterprise architectures, and health sector priorities.
- Lead technology and platform decisions with a focus on scalability, sustainability, and country ownership.
- Ensure solutions are designed for long-term support, adaptability, and local ownership.
- Develop and contribute to technical assessments, roadmaps and analysis that balance immediate delivery needs with long-term system evolution.
- Lead the design and integration of core health information systems (e.g., HIS, DHIS2, EMRs, surveillance, community health systems).
- Promote and implement interoperability standards and frameworks (e.g., FHIR, OpenHIE, national HIEs).
- Guide the development of data pipelines and analytics architectures that support timely, high-quality data use in collaboration with the government, country teams and software engineering teams.
- Provide technical oversight across multiple digital health initiatives or country implementations.
- Identify and mitigate technical, operational, and data-related risks.
- Support prioritization, sequencing, and trade-offs of digital health items in collaboration with programs, product, and country leads.
Government & Country Partnerships
- Act as a senior technical advisor and partner to Ministries of Health and government technical teams.
- Support co-design of digital health solutions with country stakeholders, ensuring responsiveness to policy, operational, and service delivery needs.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with government counterparts and local implementing partners.
- Support capacity strengthening in digital leadership and ensure gradual transition of system ownership to government and country teams.
- Ensure systems adhere to best practices in data security, privacy, and ethical data use.
- Support compliance with national regulations and international standards for health data governance.
- Establish and enforce quality assurance, documentation, and technical review processes.
Leadership, Mentorship & Technical Excellence
- Lead and mentor senior engineers, architects, and technical contributors across distributed teams.
- Set expectations for technical rigor, interoperability, and maintainability.
- Foster a culture of learning, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Required Qualifications & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Health Informatics, Information Systems, or a related field.
- Certifications in Certified Information Systems Architect (CISA) or TOGAF or AWS / Azure/GCP Solutions Architect (Professional levels) or relevant DevOps Certifications.
- Extensive experience designing and delivering digital health or health information systems with knowledge of community health information systems (CHIS), DHIS2, OpenMRS, CommCare, RapidPro, OpenSRP, or similar tools.
- Proven experience working with government or public-sector health systems.
- Strong background in systems architecture, integration, data platforms, and HIE architectures.
- Understanding of national digital health architectures, Interoperability standards (HL7 FHIR, OpenHIE, SNOMED, ICD-10) and the Global Health Digital Health guidelines.
- Knowledge of digital health standards, interoperability frameworks, and global digital health guidance.
