Senior Officer, Technical AI Initiatives 2 Year LTE

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation•Seattle, WA

3d•$209,100 - $324,100•Onsite

About The Position

This role sits at the center of FSO's AI transformation work, operating across three interconnected workstreams: the AI Steering Committee secretariat, the Foundation's enterprise AI platform, and the FSO AI Learning Agenda. The core of the role is pattern recognition and systems building across contexts. You will engage directly with staff across programmatic, operational, strategy, and IT functions to understand how knowledge work actually happens — and from that, identify where AI creates the most transformative value, at what scale, and what needs to be built. You will drive day-to-day progress across all three workstreams: developing use cases and requirements, building roadmaps, tracking the Foundation's AI portfolio, and designing learning experiences that shift how FSO staff work. This position is a limited-term position for 24 months.

Requirements

Hands-on experience building AI-enabled workflows, automations, or tools — using LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), no-code/low-code platforms (Zapier, Make, n8n), agent frameworks, or enterprise AI platforms (Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex) — with the technical intuition to evaluate feasibility, make informed build-vs-buy recommendations, and engage credibly with engineering teams on requirements and tradeoffs.
Familiarity with data infrastructure concepts sufficient to identify upstream requirements for AI use cases — including data pipelines, APIs, structured vs. unstructured data, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures.
Deep experience in strategy consulting, business analysis, product management, or a related field requiring structured problem-solving and synthesis across complex stakeholder environments.
Proven ability to pattern match and synthesize cross-cutting themes across diverse domains, building structured frameworks, taxonomies, and roadmaps from what you find.
Proven expertise mapping workflows and translating that understanding into development-ready requirements and specifications.
Significant experience preparing materials for and engaging with senior executives and board-level stakeholders, including the ability to distill complex or ambiguous topics into decision-ready formats.
Significant experience communicating with a broad and diverse audience, including across potential barriers such as language and distance.
Mastery level knowledge of end-to-end complex project management, including process design, team structure, critical thinking requirements, development of novel communication resources, and external/senior partner engagement.
Mastery level knowledge of data analysis and visualization, including the ability to use data to create persuasive narratives and novel insights.
Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located. The Foundation does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (eg: H-1B, O-1, L-1, E, OPT, STEM-OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc.).

Nice To Haves

Experience in human-centered design or service design — a practitioner's instinct for understanding what people need before designing solutions.
Familiarity with knowledge management, organizational learning, or change management frameworks.
Experience in global health, international development, or a related mission-driven sector.

Responsibilities

Prototype and iterate AI-enabled tools — copilots, agents, and workflow automations — moving from concept to usable internal solutions, with feedback loops and continuous improvement built in from the start.
Identify high-leverage use cases, map workflows and stakeholder needs with precision, and synthesize structured requirements that drive platform design and development prioritization.
Define reusable patterns for AI components that scale across teams — including prompt design, retrieval approaches, and evaluation frameworks — partnering with IT to ensure solutions are production-ready and architecturally sound.
Scope and structure complex work products for distributed execution: determine optimal sourcing approaches (external vendors, AI Fellows, or other internal resources), decompose larger initiatives into discrete components assignable across sub-groups, and ensure outputs can be integrated back into coherent, high-quality deliverables.
Monitor the external AI landscape and translate emerging developments into strategic implications for senior leadership.
Conduct discovery with FSO staff to understand their goals and workflows, then design and facilitate learning experiences — workshops, hackathons, and coaching — that build AI fluency and shift how the division works.
Act as a player-coach: guiding staff to build their own solutions where appropriate, while directly developing higher-complexity tools that require deeper systems thinking.