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Senior Officer, Technical AI Initiatives 2 Year LTE

Gates Foundation
1 day ago
Full-time
On-site
Seattle, WA United States of America

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 Team

The Foundation Strategy Office is the primary function supporting the creation and evolution of our program level strategies, as well as exploring new paths to impact that align with our mission. This includes supporting the CEO, CFO and Chief Strategy Officer in key accountabilities including strategy development, strategy revision, strategy performance measurement, portfolio management, and special initiatives to accelerate the impact of the foundation.


Within the Foundation Strategy Office, the AI Steering Committee (AI SC) Secretariat serves as the strategic and operational backbone for setting Board Chair and Executive Leadership Team’s agenda on AI, best practice identification and execution support for high-priority cross-cutting AI strategy. The AI SC was established to help the foundation navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape, enabling a cross-organization group of foundation directors to serve as the AI “nerve center” for the organization through incorporation of external trends on AI into program strategies, elevation of best practices and cross-organization prioritization of our funding and our voice on AI.

This role will be based out of the Seattle, Washington headquarters.

Your Role

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.

What You'll Do

  • 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.

Deliverables

  • Use Case and Requirements Library — Structured workflow analyses, stakeholder needs, and AI use cases organized to drive development prioritization and platform design.

  • Platform Roadmap Inputs — Multi-dimensional analyses mapping business relevance, data availability, feasibility, and strategic fit for development planning.

  • FSO AI Learning & AI Steer Co Operations AI Roadmaps — A living roadmap of capabilities and learning experiences, including net-new components surfaced through direct staff engagement.

Your Experience

  • 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.

Preferred

  • 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.

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.).

The salary range for this role is $190,100 to $294,700 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $209,100 to $324,100 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.

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Hiring Requirements

As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

Candidate Accommodations

We’re committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview process—such as an ASL interpreter, alternative interview format, or physical accessibility support—we’re happy to help. Please contact [email protected] with the position number and a brief description of your accommodation needs. Requests will be handled confidentially.

Inclusion Statement

We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.

All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.