Senior Program Officer, Software & AI

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks a Senior Program Officer (SPO), Software & AI, to lead a portfolio of software, digital health, and AI-enabled products across the Maternal, Newborn, Child Nutrition & Health portfolio. You will translate health priorities into actionable software roadmaps, ensure responsible AI, and guide product development from prototype to scale.

The role requires deep technical leadership, experience with healthcare data, and collaboration with country teams and

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience developing and scaling software, digital health, data, or AI-enabled products.
• Experience with imaging or physiologic data in a regulated environment (SaMD) preferred.
• Strong judgment on responsible AI, data governance, privacy, and security.

Responsibilities

• Lead portfolio of software, digital health, and AI-enabled investments from sourcing to reporting.
• Translate priorities into software and AI product roadmaps with clear milestones.
• Provide technical leadership across the product lifecycle: design, development, testing, deployment.
• Guide AI-enabled tools including clinical decision support and risk stratification.
• Define data structures and integration for imaging and physiologic data with standards.
• Ensure interoperability, security, and privacy across health systems and devices.

Skills

Software architecture

APIs & interoperability

Cloud & edge computing

AI/ML

Generative AI

Clinical decision support

Risk stratification

SaMD

Low-connectivity design

Product leadership

Education

Advanced degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, biomedical informatics, engineering, medicine, public health, or related field

Job description

The Foundation We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team The Gender Equality Division’s mission is to ensure women and girls in Africa and South Asia can enjoy good health, make their own choices, earn their own money, and be leaders in their societies. When women and girls have an equal chance to thrive and lead, everyone benefits. We know that women and girls are not a monolith. A woman’s experience and the barriers she faces are different depending on factors like where she lives, how old she is, and how much money her family has, alongside other factors including her race, caste, and education level. We seek to address these compounding barriers through deep partnership with our grantees. As a philanthropy, our role is to listen to and learn from these experts. We take risks in new areas, prove concepts, and bring these ideas to governments, partner organizations, and private sector companies to scale. The Gender Equality Division builds off our existing strengths as a foundation in areas like global health and data, partnering closely with all our global divisions.

The Maternal, Newborn, Child Nutrition & Health (MNCNH) team works to eliminate preventable mortality and morbidity among women, newborns, and children in low-resource settings.

We do this by funding and accelerating a portfolio of high-impact products targeted at the moments of greatest biological vulnerability across the life-course. Our portfolio addresses pregnancy risk, maternal undernutrition, prematurity, neonatal encephalopathy, child wasting, neurodevelopment, and maternal morbidity through drugs, foods, microbes, devices, risk algorithms, and increasingly through AI and connected device technologies that extend the reach of these interventions where health systems are weakest. The portfolio spans the full development continuum from early discovery through implementation research and country introduction.

A multidisciplinary team of physician scientists, epidemiologists, engineers, nutritionists, and commercialization experts works alongside in-country partners to integrate local context into research, development, and scale.

Your Role

The Senior Program Officer (SPO), Software & AI, will serve as a technical and strategic lead for software, digital health, and AI-enabled products across the MNCNH portfolio. The role will help translate high-priority health use cases into products and platforms that are technically sound, user-centered, interoperable, and deployable in low-resource settings. The portfolio may include clinical decision support, risk-stratification tools, AI-enabled applications, digital workflows, software that connects to medical devices, and other data- and software-driven approaches that improve individual-level care and health-system performance. A flagship priority for this role is accelerating risk-stratification software layered on top of the foundation's AI-enabled hardware investments, spanning antenatal ultrasound, intrapartum monitoring, and postpartum/neonatal care, turning imaging and physiologic signal data into clinically actionable outputs. The SPO will hold grantmaking responsibility for a defined portfolio of investments and work closely with MNCNH technical leads, country teams, and partners to move promising concepts from prototype through validation, productization, integration, and scale. While primarily anchored in MNCNH, this role will also serve as a shared technical resource for selected software and AI use cases across the broader Women’s Health portfolio. Success will require strong product and software-development judgment, fluency in rapidly evolving AI technologies, equally at ease with classical/deterministic modeling and generative AI methods, and able to judge which approach a given clinical use case actually calls for, and the ability to connect technical choices to real-world implementation constraints.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and manage a portfolio of grants, contracts, and other investments focused on software, digital health, and AI-enabled products, from sourcing and diligence through structuring, execution, monitoring, and reporting.
• Translate MNCNH and selected broader Women’s Health priorities into clear software and AI product roadmaps, identifying the highest-value use cases, portfolio gaps, technical dependencies, and build-versus-partner decisions.
• Provide technical leadership across the software product lifecycle, including product requirements, user-centered design, architecture, software development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and product iteration.
• Guide the development and productization of AI-enabled tools, including clinical decision support, risk stratification, workflow automation, multimodal and generative AI applications, and software that connects to medical devices or other digital platforms.
• Define how imaging (e.g., ultrasound) and physiologic signal data (e.g., intrapartum and neonatal monitoring) pools are structured, labeled, and converted into validated, productized software outputs, partnering with the foundation's data team on shared standards and infrastructure.
• Assess technical architecture and integration requirements, including APIs, interoperability, data flows, identity and access, cloud/edge/local deployment, offline and low-bandwidth operation, and integration with existing health information systems and digital public infrastructure.
• Partner with grantees, developers, researchers, country stakeholders, and implementation partners, working closely with other Program Officers across the hardware and clinical portfolio and the foundation's data team, to ensure products are designed around frontline workflows and can move from prototype or pilot to reliable, maintainable, scalable use, including at regional deployment and pilot sites.
• Apply strong judgment on responsible AI, data governance, privacy, security, clinical safety, model performance, and human oversight, and establish clear evidence and decision criteria for when products are ready to advance, scale, pause, or stop.
• Stay closely connected to the evolving software and AI ecosystem, including emerging models, platforms, vendors, and technical approaches, and translate relevant developments into practical implications for the portfolio.
• Contribute to budgeting, risk management, and sequencing of investments, with clear milestones, decision points, technical deliverables, and outcomes that support effective stewardship of foundation resources.
• Track and communicate portfolio progress and translate complex technical, product, implementation, and market evidence into clear recommendations for team and foundation leadership.
• Foster coordination across MNCNH, Women’s Health, country teams, and relevant foundation-wide digital and AI teams so that use cases build on shared capabilities rather than creating duplicative or disconnected solutions.
• Build and sustain an external ecosystem of software developers, AI companies, researchers, digital-health experts, implementers, governments, and other partners needed to advance affordable and scalable solutions for low- and middle-income countries.
• Represent the Foundation externally, including at technical and industry meetings, partner convenings, advisory groups, and engagements with governments, technology companies, and implementing organizations.

Your Experience

• Advanced degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, biomedical informatics, engineering, medicine, public health, or another relevant technical or clinical discipline.
• Minimum 10 years of relevant experience developing, launching, and scaling software, digital-health, data, or AI-enabled products; experience with health or other high-stakes applications is strongly preferred.
• Deep technical and product knowledge in several of the following areas: software architecture, APIs and interoperability, mobile or web applications, cloud and edge computing, data platforms, artificial intelligence/machine learning, generative AI, clinical decision support, risk stratification, or software as a medical device.
• Demonstrated fluency in both classical/deterministic modeling (e.g., clinical risk scores, statistical and rules-based methods) and generative AI approaches, with sound judgement about which fits a given clinical use case.
• Experience working with imaging (e.g., ultrasound) and/or physiologic signal data (e.g., intrapartum or neonatal monitoring), and experience in a regulated medical device (SaMD) context, is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to translate user and program needs into product requirements and technical roadmaps, and to work effectively with engineering teams from early prototype through deployment and iteration.
• Strong understanding of responsible AI, data governance, privacy, security, model evaluation, clinical safety, and the evidence needed to support adoption and scale of software-enabled health products.
• Experience designing or deploying products in constrained environments, including low-connectivity settings, fragmented data ecosystems, limited device access, or complex government and health-system workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to set strategy, make portfolio and investment decisions, and manage complex programs with clear milestones, budgets, risk mitigation, and outcomes.
• Strong external network and demonstrated ability to stay current in a rapidly evolving technology landscape and distinguish durable capabilities from short-lived trends or vendor-specific solutions.
• Experience working across traditional disciplinary boundaries and with senior leaders, software engineers