Artificial Intelligence (AI) Project Manager – Colombia or Kenya at Mercy Corps
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.
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.
