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, weโre committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.
The TeamThe Global Growth & Opportunity (GGO) division works to catalyze sustainable and transformative socio-economic change. In the face of inequities and market failures, GGO seeks to realize the potential of untapped markets, and ensure that economic and social benefits reach everyone. We focus on the areas of Agricultural Development; Digital Public Infrastructure; Inclusive Financial Services; Global Education, Nutrition, and Water, Sanitation & Hygiene. We seek solutions that are sustainable, transformative, and inclusive with an eye toward applying technology innovations as well as data evidence to drive change in the worldโs developing countries.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is a set of digital systems that enables countries to safely and efficiently provide economic opportunities and deliver social services. DPI spans the entire economy, connecting people, data, and money in much the same way that roads and railways connect people and goods. Countries that build safe and inclusive DPI can create a vibrant and competitive economy, foster trust between governments and citizens, and deliver essential services and create economic opportunity across many sectorsโincluding finance, health, and agriculture. Safe and inclusive DPI can ultimately help advance progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure that everyone can prosper, especially women and people with the lowest incomes.
The DPI team focuses on enabling a model for digital transformation that is inclusive, equitable, collaborative and helps accelerate the sustainable development goals. While DPI is an evolving concept, there is a growing consensus on it being a combination of (i) foundational, modular, interoperable, reusable, and scalable digital building blocks that enable creation of technologies for public interest such as identity, payments, and trusted data-sharing; (ii) a set of principles for enabling governance, regulations, and safeguards to ensure competitive markets and mitigate risks; and (iii) a community of public, private, academic, and civil society stakeholders working together to drive innovation, inclusion, and large scale impact through user-centric services and products. Several key foundational categories of DPI include identifiers, registries, electronic signatures, consent mechanisms, and AI/Machine Learning models.
The Gates Foundation is focusing its initial DPI efforts on supporting countries in building the three core elements of DPI: 1) Digital identity systems, which enable the creation, management, and authentication of unique identities for use in digital scenarios, 2) Digital payment systems, which enable governments, businesses, and individuals to instantly send and receive money, regardless of who hosts the underlying accounts, and 3) Data exchange systems, which enable individuals, organizations, and governments to safely share digital information.
The foundationโs digital payments work is overseen by our Inclusive Financial Systems team, while the DPI manages our work on digital identity and data exchange.
Our work on digital identity is more mature and moving to scale. We seek to leverage our teamโs expertise in digital identity systems to lead a global learning agenda on other emerging DPI areas, including, but not limited to:
Trusted data sharing: shape inclusive & responsible data-sharing ecosystems with an aim to show how secure and efficient data sharing can unlock access to essential public services, improve governance, and foster innovation while protecting privacy.
Voice technologies and Language AI: explore how AI-driven voice technologies and language tools can ensure that digital services are accessible to everyone, regardless of literacy or language.
By establishing open, standardized, and interoperable systems for performing these functions, DPI can enable more inclusive economic participation, more effective delivery of public services, and more open and competitive digital economies.
This role will be based out of the Seattle, Washington office.
Your Role
As the Deputy Director, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Emerging Innovations and Internal Advisory Support you will report to the Director DPI and play a central role in building, designing, evaluating, and overseeing the development of cutting-edge DPI initiatives for impact across the foundationโs priority areas. You will be working closely with a team overseeing our work in digital identity systems, and leading a team responsible for both establishing a learning agenda around emerging DPI components, and providing subject matter advisory services and deep collaborations across the Gates Foundation.
Your primary responsibilities will be to refine the vision and articulate an execution approach for your teamโs components of the DPI strategy, manage a team of investment makers, and lead projects that will lead to measurable progress against the teamโs goals and vision. This may involve engaging with public and private stakeholders within low- and middle-income countries, as well as developing internal relationships and processes in support of the foundationโs work. The role will require working with a diverse range of internal colleagues, technical and scientific partners, governments, multilateral institutions across a wide array of domains and expertise.
You will be expected to partner with team members within the DPI team and across the foundation to identify interdependencies, communicate execution requirements, track progress, make decisions, and identify and mitigate risks. You will also partner with the DPI program policy advocacy and communications team to ensure the insights from your portfolio are integrated into advocacy and communications opportunities to achieve our goals. International experience and deep technical expertise are crucial for success in this role.
What Youโll Do
Provide thought leadership on DPI internally and externally, staying abreast of evolutions in the field, representing the foundation to external constituencies through formal and informal presentations, and supporting teams across the foundation with subject matter advisory services.
Shape emerging areas across the DPI field including, but not limited to, trusted data sharing, and voice technologies and language models.
Serve on the DPI Leadership Team and Investment Committee, informing overall strategy, grant making, team design, and culture, advising the director on areas related to your teamโs expertise.
Build and maintain an understanding of the foundationโs digital investment landscape and identify areas across global health, global development, global growth, and gender equality strategies where DPI approaches can accelerate individual program impact and/or generate cross-foundation efficiencies.
Leverage internal resources, foundation processes, and relationships to increase foundation-wide understanding of what DPIs are, generate demand, and identify high-impact opportunities for collaboration and support.
Establish an approach to test and collate DPIs that can be reused across varying programs; register new DPIs in relevant public databases, and help teams discover how to apply them in relevant use cases.
Build, cultivate, and manage a cohesive, high-impact team that integrates a culture of inclusivity, rigor, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Build systems, processes, and provide support for new investment makers to make high quality, data-driven investment decisions, and learning from them (e.g., identifying key levers and partnerships, measuring and tracking impact, managing risk, etc.)
Provide clear, concise, and insightful written analyses and recommendations for investments and team strategy, writing and producing briefings, reports, email updates, and other materials to inform foundation leadership.
Your Experience
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