Volunteer AI Systems Architect for Public Impact

African Development Choices (ADC) is a UK-registered charity on a mission to reduce poverty by empowering communities to make more informed choices in the management of public resources. ADC’s purpose is to enable communities to independently meet their needs for essential services, such as clean water and safe sanitation, and improve lives in Africa. At ADC we encourage a working culture of seeking and giving input, showing and taking initiative, and commitment to the organisation and its purpose. We now have an exciting opportunity for a volunteer Senior AI Agent Architect to join ADC and help build a live prototype of MajiGuard AI.

Main purpose of job: To lead the technical design and hands-on development of MajiGuard AI, an agentic AI prototype that helps ADC identify underused WASH resources, structure recovery and reallocation cases, and verify that recovered value reaches facility upgrades and operations and maintenance.

Main Duties & Responsibilities:

• Lead the end-to-end architecture of MajiGuard AI, including the selection and integration of models, agent workflows, orchestration tools, retrieval systems, data structures and human-in-the-loop controls appropriate for a live prototype.
• Translate ADC’s operational goals into practical AI workflows, especially for identifying underused WASH resources, standardising evidence and case preparation, supporting recovery and reallocation decisions, and verifying delivery of value to facility improvements and ongoing operations and maintenance.
• Build and iterate a live prototype using pragmatic, cost-effective tooling, with strong attention to reliability, traceability, security, maintainability and ease of future scaling.
• Design structured inputs, prompts, evaluation criteria and decision logic so that outputs are useful to non-technical ADC teams working across programmes, research, partnerships and leadership.
• Establish a technical roadmap for the prototype, including architecture choices, milestone planning, testing priorities, deployment options and documentation for future funders, partners and developers.
• Work closely with ADC leadership to shape the product vision and ensure the prototype aligns with ADC’s wider governance and public service innovation model.
• Advise on suitable approaches for data governance, privacy, model risk, hallucination control, auditability and responsible AI use in the context of public-resource management and service delivery.
• Define and monitor prototype success metrics, including usefulness, accuracy, turnaround time, workflow fit, and operational learning that can strengthen grant applications, partnerships and future product development.
• Support the transition from local experimentation to a live prototype environment, including basic cloud or hosted deployment thinking, version control practices and engineering handover readiness.
• Mentor and coordinate other volunteer technical contributors where relevant, helping ADC build a small but high-quality AI capability around MajiGuard AI.

Knowledge, skills, and experience:

Essential

• 8+ years of relevant experience in AI, machine learning, applied NLP, intelligent automation, agentic systems, or modern software engineering for production-grade data or AI products.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and building AI systems, including LLM-based applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agent workflows, orchestration frameworks, evaluation pipelines and API integrations.
• Experience taking ideas from concept or prototype stage into a usable live product, pilot or production-like environment.
• Excellent technical judgement on model selection, system design trade-offs, latency, reliability, observability and cost-conscious engineering.
• Strong programming ability, ideally including Python and modern backend tooling, with the ability to work across architecture, implementation and troubleshooting.
• Experience designing structured workflows where AI outputs must be reviewable, auditable and useful for operational decision-making.
• Ability to simplify complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and translate mission goals into practical product choices.
• Interest in using AI to strengthen public service delivery, accountability, governance, resource allocation, or adjacent social impact problems.
• Ability to actively take initiative and help set things up in a start-up environment.
• Ability to actively seek and give input in a collaborative team environment.
• A committed team player with good communication skills.
• Available to volunteer at least 8-12 hours a week.

Desirable

• Experience with agentic AI products involving workflow automation, task routing, multi-step reasoning, document intelligence or evidence-based case management.
• Experience with cloud deployment, containerisation, CI/CD, databases, vector stores, authentication and production monitoring for AI systems.
• Experience working on civic tech, govtech, development, WASH, infrastructure, audit, compliance or public-finance-related products.
• Experience working in an early-stage start-up or mission-driven organisation and comfortable operating with ambiguity.
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading small technical teams across different locations and time zones.

What ADC Offers You

This is a volunteer, remote and unpaid position with the following benefits:

• A chance to play a foundational role in shaping MajiGuard AI from concept into a live prototype with real strategic relevance to ADC’s mission.
• An opportunity to apply advanced AI and product-building skills to a meaningful public-interest challenge connected to WASH, accountability and service delivery in Africa.
• An opportunity to work with a diverse global team and contribute to an organisation seeking systemic social change.
• Professional learning, leadership and portfolio-building opportunities through high-ownership work.
• Work reference provided.

Here at African Development Choices, we celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our teams are made up of people from all over the world and we welcome all applications. If you are disabled or have a long-term health condition, and you require any reasonable adjustments for your application with us, please let us know by contacting recruitment(at)africandevelopmentchoices(dot)org.