Technology Director

Key Responsibilities

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

Preferred Skills

• Working proficiency in French or Portuguese
• Background in survey operations or data collection, such as work on or with the Demographic & Health Surveys (DHS) Program, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), a national census, or other population-based household surveys
• Experience delivering technology for global health or international development programs in low- and middle-income countries
• Experience with field data-collection systems for low-connectivity settings (e.g., e, c, ODK), or with offline or edge deployment
• Experience working with national statistical offices or ministries of health
• Experience leading a stage-gated R&D or innovation portfolio, including a decision to stop a workstream
• Experience setting and being held to quantitative acceptance thresholds for an AI or data system
• Experience with multi-country deployments where data cannot leave a jurisdiction, and with data privacy and governance for human data, including IRB processes
• Experience with cybersecurity practices, security controls, and authorization processes
• Publications or conference presentations in AI, survey methods, or global health
• Advanced degree in computer science, statistics, demography, public health, or a related field

Professional Skills

• Credible with both engineers and executives. Can lead a technical design review in the morning and brief a funder's leadership in the afternoon
• Sound judgment under uncertainty. Can tell a workstream that is late from one that isn't going to work, and acts on it
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders, including survey experts and government partners
• Strong presentation skills, with the ability to simplify complex topics for business, funder, and program audiences
• Works productively and builds relationships at all levels and across cultures, from senior leadership to entry level
• Self-motivated. Finds ways to add value without a lot of direct supervision