In A Nutshell
Provide strategic guidance on the Gates Foundation’s AI agenda and build high-trust, high-impact relationships with leading technology companies.
Responsibilities
Strategy advisor to leadership
- Brief the President and Chair on platform choices, partner roadmaps, and where AI-enabled software can deliver outsized impact across health, growth & opportunity, education, and government data use.
- Produce crisp decision memos with trade-offs (build/buy/partner), budget implications, risks, and success metrics; run quarterly strategy refreshes.
Ecosystem partnerships
- Serve as the primary relationship owner with senior counterparts at Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
- Negotiate/manage MOUs covering model/compute credits, technical enablement, support for evaluations/red-teaming, pricing, data safeguards, and social-impact pilots.
- Advise cross-functional Foundation workstreams (program/ENG, security, legal, comms, country offices) and clear blockers quickly.
Technical leadership (software/cloud first)
- Define vendor-agnostic reference architectures for data ingestion, retrieval, privacy-preserving analytics, observability/telemetry, and human-in-the-loop workflows tailored to LMIC constraints (low bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, cost ceilings, localization).
- Advise on technical due diligence and RFPs; pathways for initiatives like the virtual doctor for self-care in HIV and pregnancy.
Ethical AI for underserved populations
- Embed equity-by-design practices: participatory/co-design with local partners, accessibility and language inclusion, harm minimization, safety incident response, data minimization/sovereignty, and transparent documentation.
- Ensure partner engagements include clear guardrails on data use, consent, and privacy; ensure systems are evaluated for benefit, safety, and fairness across subgroups.
Program execution & measurement
- Turn ambiguous opportunities into scoped programs with OKRs, timelines, budgets, and measurable outcomes (e.g., cost per successful self-care episode, time-to-advice, safety incident rate, equitable performance across languages/demographics).
- Publish quarterly ecosystem scorecards and an annual “State of AI for Impact” brief.
Communication & influence
- Craft board-ready narratives and external remarks; represent the Foundation in senior forums with AI labs/clouds, multilaterals, and governments.
- Coach internal teams on partner management and technical topics; model collaborative, low-ego engagement.
Integrity & conflict-of-interest management
- Maintain strict independence in vendor evaluations; manage disclosures/recusals as needed; codify public-benefit alignment principles in agreements.
Skillset
- 15+ years as a senior Technical Leader (or equivalent Principal/Director/VP-level program leader) delivering large, multi-team software/digital/cloud programs.
- Deep fluency with cloud platforms (Azure/GCP/AWS), APIs, data platforms, security/privacy controls, observability, and productization at scale.
- Demonstrated success owning executive-level, partner-facing relationships and complex agreements across product, engineering, legal, and security.
- Data-savvy and metrics-driven: comfortable defining instrumentation, reading dashboards/SQL-level insight, and making decisions from evidence.
- Excellent writing and executive presence; able to brief the Chair and senior external leaders.
- AI enthusiasm and literacy—eager to apply modern AI tools safely and pragmatically (direct AI research experience not required).
- Prior experience inside an AI lab or major cloud provider or building evaluation/guardrail pipelines.
- Experience in LMIC settings, public sector, or regulated domains (health, education, gov data).
- Track record with localization and accessibility at scale (multilingual, low-resource environments).
- Open-source/community engagement (tooling, standards, or deployments).