Location: Lusaka, Zambia
Healthy Learners is an award-winning non-profit working to improve the health and learning of children across Zambia. In partnership with the Government of Zambia, it brings healthcare directly into schools, operating 1,062 health rooms in 45 districts and reaching more than 1.4 million learners through Zambia's first integrated School Health Program.
The Senior Engineer (reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, Digital Health department, Manager/Associate Director level) will lead the design, development, quality assurance, deployment and ongoing management of machine learning, health data and digital health application systems. The role combines senior AI/ML engineering with data engineering, health informatics, data architecture and systems integration, with particular competence in managing pediatric clinical data, including consent, privacy and safeguarding. It is a low-contact position under the Child Safeguarding Policy.
Key responsibilities:
- AI/ML and model management: design, develop, test, deploy and maintain ML models; establish evaluation frameworks and QA; monitor performance, data drift and safety risks; manage versioning, retraining and rollback; ensure models are validated, explainable and subject to human review, including across pediatric and underserved populations.
- Health application management: apply privacy, pseudonymization, encryption and access-control practices for child health data; ensure models work in Zambia's context (mobile-first, intermittent connectivity, offline capture); apply explainability techniques.
- Feature and data engineering: adapt pretrained models through fine-tuning and transfer learning; prototype computer vision, predictive analytics, NLP and anomaly detection; design scalable data architectures and pipelines; establish data standards and governance.
- Government and third-party integration: support data integration planning with the Ministries of Health and Education; assess systems and interoperability; support secure API-based integrations and third-party data contribution tools; contribute to data-sharing agreements.
- Collaboration and leadership: work with clinical, program, M&E, product, engineering and operations teams; lead testing, UAT, releases and incident resolution; mentor junior staff.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Health Informatics, Statistics or a related field.
- 5-8 years of experience in ML engineering, data engineering, software engineering, health informatics or digital health.
- Proven experience deploying and monitoring production ML models.
- Strong experience with data pipelines, architecture, APIs, databases and system integration.
- Strong Python and SQL skills; cloud platforms and MLOps practices.
- Understanding of child safeguarding, health data privacy, consent and responsible AI.
- Experience deploying models on mobile, edge or resource-constrained platforms.
- Familiarity with health information systems, interoperability standards and offline-first applications.
- Must be a fully registered member of the Information and Communications Technology Association of Zambia (ICTAZ) with a valid practicing license.
HOW TO APPLY:
Apply online via the Healthy Learners BambooHR careers page: https://healthylearners.bamboohr.com/careers/104