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).

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