AI Scientist

World Bank Group•Washington, DC

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? The World Bank Group is a unique global partnership of five institutions driven by a bold vision to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet. As one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries, we help solve the world’s greatest development challenges. When you join the World Bank Group, you become part of a dynamic, diverse organization with 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide. We work with public and private sector partners, invest in groundbreaking projects, and use data, research, and technology to bring tangible and transformative changes around the globe. For more information, visit www.worldbank.org. VPU Context: The Development Economics Vice Presidency (DEC) is the World Bank’s central reservoir of fresh insights into the most pressing challenges of development. It is led by the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank Group, who advises the President and senior managers, serves as the community leader for the WBG’s economists, and helps to keep the institution in the forefront of thinking about development policy. DEC constitutes one of the world’s largest teams of economists focused on policy solutions for developing economies. Unit Context: A department of the World Bank's Development Economics Vice-Presidency, the Development Impact Department (DECDI)I’s purpose is to increase the use of impact evaluation (IE) in the design and implementation of public policy and to develop institutional capacity and motivation for evidence-based policy. DECDI’s work focuses on: • Evaluating programs at scale to answer policy-relevant questions. • Developing innovative data systems and data analytics tools for real-time decisions. • Using causal inference analysis to identify mechanisms to improve results. • Building capacity to strengthen country institutions for evidence-based policymaking. DECDI aims to overcome the challenge to identify true cause-and-effect relations in policy programs. By linking researchers to policymakers and feeding results back into policies, DECDI fosters systematic use of evidence, which informs adoption, mid-course corrections, and scale-up of policies. Through workshops and clinics with operational staff and government clients, joint research teams, active field coordination, as well as research products such as seminars, papers, and policy briefs, DECDI builds capacity while forming a wider community of practice. DECDI accompanies impact evaluations during their entire life-cycle. It starts with assessing demand, identifying research questions, as well as supporting project implementation, high quality data collection, analysis, and dissemination of results. With a portfolio of more than 220 impact evaluations, DECDI operates across all sectors in about 60 countries spanning the globe. The IEs test a variety of interventions and mechanisms to understand why policy succeeds or fails and how to improve policy design and implementation to obtain better results. By working proactively in collaboration with clients, DECDI employs experimental methods to infer causality whenever possible (79% of the portfolio). 17% of DECDI IEs utilize non-experimental methods, while 4% use a combination of the two. DECDI is structured into 5 World Bank units: • DECPL: Planet Impact Lab. • DECPE: People Impact Lab. • DECPR: Prosperity Impact Lab. • DECID: Infrastructure and Digital Impact Lab. • DECMB: Behavior Science Lab. More information can be found at https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/unit/unit-dec/impactevaluation. Duties and accountabilities: We are looking for a strong candidate to lead high-impact AI research and development initiatives. Below is a summary of the key responsibilities for the role: • Lead end-to-end AI product development, from ideation to deployment, including the ZeroHungerAI platform, an open-access, district-level food crisis prediction system covering 82 countries. • Manage and mentor a team of researchers and engineers, setting technical direction, ensuring quality, and supporting individual growth. • Define and maintain project plans, product roadmaps, and strategic vision in close coordination with the AI Lab Lead and senior leadership. • Identify project-market fit and assess where AI solutions can address real-world development and humanitarian needs; engage proactively with relevant stakeholders to validate and refine this. • Lead fundraising efforts for high-impact AI research projects, including cultivating donor relationships, developing grant proposals, and representing the AI Lab in partnership discussions. • Act as a focal point for key external partnerships, including with private sector actors, government, and multilateral partners.

Requirements

Master’s degree in computer science, Data Science, Software Engineering or related field with a minimum of 5 years of relevant professional experience.
Expertise in Python, SQL, and software engineering best practices, including testing, version control, CI/CD, and production-quality code.
Deep expertise in modern AI and machine learning, including foundation models, multimodal models, reinforcement learning where appropriate, probabilistic modeling, time-series forecasting, causal machine learning, and geospatial AI.
Experience designing and deploying agentic AI systems, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tool use, function calling, multi-agent orchestration, long-context reasoning, evaluation frameworks, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and model optimization.
Strong experience building AI products for production, including MLOps, LLMOps, model serving, monitoring, observability, automated evaluation, guardrails, and continuous improvement pipelines.
Experience integrating heterogeneous data sources (structured databases, satellite imagery, weather, geospatial, administrative, survey, sensor and real-time data) into scalable AI systems.
Expertise with cloud-native AI infrastructure, including Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud; containerization (Docker/Kubernetes); distributed computing; GPU environments; vector databases; and scalable inference architectures.
Knowledge of modern AI engineering frameworks, including PyTorch, TensorFlow/JAX, Hugging Face, LangGraph, LangChain (or equivalent), Ray, vLLM, and distributed training/inference environments.
Experience with AI safety, robustness, and responsible AI, including evaluation methodologies, uncertainty estimation, explainability, security, privacy-preserving AI, and governance for high-stakes applications.
Ability to translate frontier AI research into operational systems, balancing technical innovation with reliability, usability, and measurable development impact.
Commitment to teamwork, knowledge-sharing, and working across sectoral and organizational boundaries.
Experience mentoring, coaching, and supervising consultants.
Ability to work flexibly, creatively, and to multitask as the need arises. High degree of self-motivation, positive attitude, commitment, and drive.
Willingness and ability to travel, when needed.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of additional languages is desired.

Responsibilities

Lead end-to-end AI product development, from ideation to deployment, including the ZeroHungerAI platform, an open-access, district-level food crisis prediction system covering 82 countries.
Manage and mentor a team of researchers and engineers, setting technical direction, ensuring quality, and supporting individual growth.
Define and maintain project plans, product roadmaps, and strategic vision in close coordination with the AI Lab Lead and senior leadership.
Identify project-market fit and assess where AI solutions can address real-world development and humanitarian needs; engage proactively with relevant stakeholders to validate and refine this.
Lead fundraising efforts for high-impact AI research projects, including cultivating donor relationships, developing grant proposals, and representing the AI Lab in partnership discussions.
Act as a focal point for key external partnerships, including with private sector actors, government, and multilateral partners.