Location: Colombia or Kenya (home base)

Position Status: Full-time

Duration: 12 months (potential extension contingent on funding)

Closing date: Please submit application by May 10

About Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps is powered by the belief that a better world is possible. To do this, we know our teams do their best work when they are diverse and every team member feels that they belong. We welcome diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills so that we can be stronger and have long-term impact.

The Impact Alliance

CARE, Mercy Corps, and Save the Children are exploring a deeper strategic collaboration to increase impact, efficiency, and local leadership in global assistance. In the context of major shifts in global funding, each organization recognizes that increasing impact requires new ways of working together. We are initiating a set of collaborative opportunities designed to prototype this Impact Alliance. These opportunities range from shared procurement and support services to participant feedback tools and a more coordinated approach to working with local partners. Plan International, Inc. is joining the Impact Alliance as a fourth organization solely in relation to the share procurement workstream.

To support this work, we are seeking a technical project manager to lead project-based work in the AI workstream as part of the Mercy Corps Technology for Development department.

The Position

The Technical Project / Product Manager for Codename Compass is the operational and technical backbone of a 12-month, $300,000 Minimum Viable Product initiative funded by the Impact Alliance (Mercy Corps, Save the Children, and CARE). Compass is designed to prove that ambient voice capture technology can enable a single field worker to conduct natural conversations with community members while the system automatically transcribes and structures responses into a humanitarian data workflow—eliminating the need for a second staff member dedicated to form entry.

Beyond immediate operational efficiency, Compass will generate a validated dataset of community voice recordings in low-resource languages (e.g., Hausa, Tigrinya, Swahili) with informed community consent suitable for downstream AI language model training.

Working under the Senior Director for T4D, the Technical Project / Product Manager owns day-to-day delivery across all three project phases, serves as the primary coordination point across the Impact Alliance consortium, manages the contracted MVP development team, and holds relationships with NLP research partners. This role is equal parts project manager, product owner, and technical steward.

Essential 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, 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.

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 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.

LEARNING AND IMPACT

• 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.

Supervisory Responsibility

Direct Reports: Consultants and junior staff

Accountability

Reports Directly To: Sr. Director, T4D (Mercy Corps)

Works Directly With: Impact Alliance AI Workstream leads and their delegates (Save the Children, CARE); T4D Data Science and AI teams; MEL/MEL Tech; Finance; Field Program Managers; contracted development team

Accountability to Participants and Stakeholders

Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our program participants, community partners, other stakeholders, and international standards guiding international relief and development work. We are committed to actively engaging communities as equal partners in designing, monitoring, and evaluating our field projects.

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 - or the ability to develop technical fluency in these areas rapidly.

• 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, particularly in contexts involving vulnerable populations.

• Experience coordinating multi-stakeholder projects with competing priorities and tight timelines.

• Excellent project management, budgeting, and reporting skills; experience delivering donor-funded technology projects preferred.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to translate technical decisions into accessible language for field staff, donors, and steering committees.

• Fluency in English is required; proficiency in French, Spanish, Swahili, Hausa, Tigrinya, or other low-resource languages is a significant asset.

Success Factors

The ideal candidate combines technical depth with field-grounded pragmatism. They are energized by the complexity of getting emerging technology to work in real humanitarian conditions—not a controlled lab. They 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. They do not hesitate to seek clarification and assistance when needed and are able to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences. They bring a 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.

Living Conditions / Environmental Conditions

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.

Ongoing Learning

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.

Team Engagement and Effectiveness

Achieving our mission starts with how we build our team and collaborate. By bringing together individuals with a variety of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives, we strengthen our ability to solve complex challenges and drive innovation. We foster a culture of trust and respect, where every team member is valued for their contributions, empowered to reach their full potential, and motivated to do their best work.

We recognize that building a strong and effective team is an ongoing process, and we remain committed to learning, improving, and growing together.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Mercy Corps is an equal opportunity employer committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion or belief, national origin, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristics protected under applicable law.

Safeguarding & Ethics

Mercy Corps is committed to ensuring that all individuals we come into contact with through our work, whether team members, community members, program participants or others, are treated with respect and dignity. We are committed to the core principles regarding prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse laid out by the UN Secretary General and IASC and have signed on to the Interagency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme. We will not tolerate child abuse, sexual exploitation, abuse, or harassment by or of our team members. As part of our commitment to a safe and inclusive work environment, team members are expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner, respect local laws and customs, and to adhere to Mercy Corps Code of Conduct Policies and values at all times. Team members are required to complete mandatory Code of Conduct elearning courses upon hire and on an annual basis.

As an applicant, if you witness or experience any form of sexual misconduct during the recruitment process, please report this to Mercy Corps Integrity Hotline (integrityhotline@mercycorps.org).

How to apply

learn more and apply here: Mercy Corps Careers - Artificial Intelligence (AI) Project Manager - Colombia or Kenya