Head of AI & Program Technology Engineering

International Rescue Committee•Nairobi, NY

4d•$185,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is seeking a Head of AI Engineering to lead the technical team responsible for building and deploying AI-powered, program-facing solutions. This senior technical leadership role involves shaping the technical strategy, managing a high-performing engineering team, and fostering deep partnerships with program leaders and strategic partners. The goal is to leverage AI to address humanitarian crises, reaching hundreds of millions of people in challenging environments by developing agentic systems, predictive analytics, and AI diagnostics. The IRC is committed to using AI to multiply the impact of frontline workers, anticipate crises, and provide tools to underserved regions.

Requirements

Hands-on experience building and shipping production AI systems — agentic frameworks, LLM applications, RAG systems, computer vision, or applied ML pipelines.
Solid full-stack foundation (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks) with the technical credibility to engage directly with engineers on architecture and design decisions.
Experience with cloud architecture (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP transferable), including AI services, DevOps pipelines, and cost-effective scaling.
Working knowledge of data security and privacy practices for sensitive or personally identifiable information.
7–10+ years in software engineering or technical product development, with 3+ years leading engineers as a manager or tech lead.
A track record of building or growing strong engineering teams — hiring, raising the bar, and creating a culture people want to be part of.
Ability to engage non-technical leaders as a peer: explaining trade-offs clearly, listening well, and translating between worlds.
Comfort operating across global teams, time zones, and contexts very different from your own.
Genuinely motivated by humanitarian impact.
Leads with humility.
Deep respect for the people closest to the problem, including those without technical backgrounds.
Technically curious and forward-looking — reads, experiments, and brings new ideas to the team.

Nice To Haves

Experience deploying AI in low-resource, low-bandwidth, or offline contexts.
Prior work with humanitarian, development, or global health organizations.
French or Arabic language skills.

Responsibilities

Translate IRC's AI strategy and program priorities into a prioritized technical roadmap, in close partnership with program leaders, the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture, and the T4P demand pipeline.
Stay at the edge of AI/ML advances — particularly in agentic systems, multimodal models, and edge/on-device inference — and bring promising approaches to IRC's programs.
Serve as a core member of IRC's AI leadership, helping shape organizational direction alongside the SVP for Research, Innovation, AI, and People & Culture and other senior leaders.
Champion responsible, human-centered AI deployment in some of the most sensitive humanitarian contexts in the world, with the safety standards those contexts demand.
Represent IRC in technical discussions with partners, peer organizations, donors, and the broader humanitarian and AI sectors.
Manage and develop a team of engineers, applied AI engineers, and QA specialists.
Hire well, raise the bar, and build a culture that strong technical people want to be part of.
Establish engineering quality standards, development practices, and documentation protocols.
Maintain a prioritized backlog of program innovations and manage team capacity against demand.
Mature the team's AI development and DevOps practices and grow stakeholder buy-in across the organization.
Identify opportunities to secure budget resources in support of innovation priorities.
Act as a genuine thought partner to program leaders — bringing AI fluency to their problems and humility about the field realities.
Co-design solutions that actually work in the field, not technology-first answers in search of problems.
Partner with the Enterprise Applications team to ensure smooth handoffs of proven innovations for enterprise-wide scale-up.
Coordinate with the Enterprise Applications DevOps team on integration touchpoints, infrastructure dependencies, and shared engineering standards.
Serve as the technical lead on IRC's strategic partnerships with frontier AI organizations — helping turn early relationships into long-term, high-leverage collaborations.
Identify where partnership access (compute, frontier models, technical expertise) can unlock outsized program impact.
Lead the design and development of AI-driven and program-specific technology solutions, owning the full development lifecycle from requirements through handoff.
Interface with program and business stakeholders to gather requirements, define technical solutions, and recommend approaches grounded in a detailed understanding of program goals.
Design and oversee high-availability architectures in Microsoft Azure, incorporating appropriate redundancy, security, backup, and recovery strategies — including for sensitive humanitarian data.
Research and recommend technology products, services, and standards — particularly in AI/ML — to support procurement, development, and strategic decision-making.
Oversee deployment pipelines, CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, and QA processes to ensure efficient and reliable software delivery.
Ensure ongoing availability and performance of applications through monitoring, scaling, and proactive operations management.
Track and optimize cloud and model-inference costs.
Maintain technical and policy documentation for all assets under the team's management.

Benefits

10 sick days
10 US holidays
20-25 paid time off days depending on role and tenure
medical insurance starting at $163 per month
dental starting at $6.50 per month
vision starting at $5 per month
FSA for healthcare and commuter costs
a 403b retirement savings plans with immediately vested matching
disability & life insurance
Employee Assistance Program which is available to our staff and their families to support counseling and care in times of crisis and mental health struggles.