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- Tasks: Lead the development of Africa-first language models and ensure high-quality delivery.
- Company: Join GSMA, a leader in mobile technology with a focus on diversity and innovation.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive pay, flexible working, generous holidays, and professional development opportunities.
- Other info: Work in a dynamic environment with excellent career growth and learning opportunities.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on AI for African languages and collaborate with diverse teams.
- Qualifications: Experience in NLP and language model development, especially for low-resource languages.
The predicted salary is between 70000 - 90000 ÂŁ per year.
Department: Technology
Team: AI Foundry
Location: London (Hybrid or Remote) / Nairobi
Position type: Contractor (umbrella – inside IR35) until 24th December 2026; Full Time
What the hiring manager says: "The Africa AI Language Initiative is one of our most strategically important efforts — aiming to build Africa-first, open, locally representative AI models across the continent’s most widely spoken languages. As our Subject Matter Expert, you will play a pivotal role in shaping model design, guiding technical execution, and ensuring high-quality delivery across multiple partners."
About the team: The Africa AI Language Initiative brings together mobile operators, African researchers, startups, academia, and GSMA to build and deploy open, representative language models for Africa. The team is multidisciplinary — spanning AI research, data governance, telco engagement, technical programme delivery, and community development.
About the role: You will guide the development of 3–5 Africa-first open language models end-to-end, acting as the technical anchor and coordinator across multiple model-building tracks. You will ensure alignment between researchers, operators, and partners, while driving high-quality technical outcomes, documentation, and model readiness.
About you: You will bring demonstrable experience in developing and evaluating language models, with a strong grounding in NLP techniques relevant to African languages. You’ll be able to work across diverse linguistic structures—such as tonal variation, agglutination, rich morphology, and non-standardised orthographies—to ensure that models reflect real-world language use across the continent. Your ability to analyse datasets, identify representational gaps, and guide the creation of high-quality corpora will directly shape the performance and inclusiveness of our Africa first models. You’ll be comfortable working end-to-end across the research workflow: from tokenisation strategies suitable for low resource languages, to training and finetuning multilingual models, to designing evaluation methods that capture linguistic nuance. You will apply your technical depth to help partners understand model behaviour, tradeoffs, and opportunities for improvement. You’ll communicate these insights clearly, helping a broad ecosystem—including operators, researchers, community groups, and developers—collaborate effectively around open model development. You’ll be curious and adaptable, able to test new methods quickly while maintaining scientific rigour. Through structured documentation, reproducible experimentation, and responsible data practices, you’ll help ensure these open models meet the highest standards for transparency and reliability.
About your skills: You will bring demonstrable experience in NLP/LLMs, especially for multilingual or low-resource languages, and the ability to coordinate complex technical programmes. You’ll need to communicate effectively across teams, drive delivery, and work autonomously while contributing to a collaborative ecosystem.
- Core skills:
- Data Analysis: You’ll apply analytical rigour to evaluate datasets and model outputs, identifying linguistic patterns, bias risks, and areas for improving representation across African languages.
- AI Research: You’ll explore and adapt advanced NLP techniques—including tokenisation, alignment, and evaluation methods—to address the challenges of low-resource and morphologically rich languages.
- Communication: You’ll translate complex technical concepts into clear, accessible explanations for partners across Africa, enabling shared understanding of modelling decisions and outcomes.
- Delivery: You’ll drive research workstreams with structure and consistency, ensuring training runs, evaluations, documentation, and model releases are delivered to a high technical standard.
- Stakeholder Management: You’ll collaborate confidently with researchers, operators, universities, and data communities, ensuring alignment on linguistic priorities, data quality, and model behaviour.
Contract type: Short term Contractor
Worker type: Contingent Worker
What We Offer: Working at the GSMA offers you unparalleled access to the mobile industry. We offer a chance to truly shape the direction of mobile, whatever your role. By joining the GSMA, you will be exposed to a fast-paced rapidly evolving environment, working on global solutions, genuinely fascinating and industry-changing projects and a stimulating and dynamic environment designed to enable you to flourish. In addition to architect-designed offices and competitive compensation, our benefits include fantastic learning & development opportunities, generous holiday allowances, four additional days off for professional development and many others.
Being You at the GSMA: We care deeply about diversity, equity and inclusivity and aspire to be the best at it. Your well-being and work/life balance is important, so flexi-time and remote working is available to all staff. We're keen to ensure everyone is equal, represented and connected so we particularly encourage applications from all demographics. The success of the GSMA year on year will continue to be contributed by people from all walks of life.
GSMA Values: Our values not only drive our culture – they shape how we work and interact inside and outside our global organisation.
- Passionately driven: We approach everything we do with unparalleled capability, tenacity and commitment, knowing that the challenging scale, pace and complexity of our work is what leads to its world-changing impact.
- Insightful leaders: We continually develop and engage our expertise, insight and creativity so that we’re always ready to respond to the changing landscape with authority, agility and nuance.
- Stronger together: We lean on each other so the industry can lean on us, embracing our diversity by actively seeking out perspectives and skill sets beyond our own, fuelling each other’s successes and constantly asking how we can help.
Underpinning our values is our collective mindset to show up purposefully as good human beings every day, in every situation. When we’re at our best – we are collaborative, considerate and compassionate to others, and we create a safe space for one another to thrive, assuming positive intent in our colleagues. And if we aren’t at our best and the pressure is on – we feel free to be ourselves but still remain curious, lean into the tough stuff and we are always respectful to others and accountable for the part we play.
AI Research Lead - African First Language Models in London employer: GSM Conference Services
Contact Detail:
GSM Conference Services Recruiting Team
StudySmarter Expert Advice 🤫
We think this is how you could land AI Research Lead - African First Language Models in London
✨Tip Number 1
Network like a pro! Reach out to people in the industry, especially those connected to the Africa AI Language Initiative. A friendly chat can open doors and give you insights that a job description just can't.
✨Tip Number 2
Show off your skills! Prepare a portfolio or a presentation that highlights your experience with NLP techniques and language models. This is your chance to demonstrate how you can contribute to building Africa-first models.
✨Tip Number 3
Be ready for a technical interview! Brush up on your knowledge of data analysis and model evaluation methods. They’ll want to see how you tackle real-world challenges, so think through some examples beforehand.
✨Tip Number 4
Apply through our website! It’s the best way to ensure your application gets seen by the right people. Plus, it shows you’re genuinely interested in being part of the GSMA team.
We think you need these skills to ace AI Research Lead - African First Language Models in London
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show Your Passion for AI: Let us see your enthusiasm for AI and language models right from the start. Share your experiences and projects that highlight your commitment to developing Africa-first models, as this will resonate with our mission.
Tailor Your Application: Make sure to customise your CV and cover letter to reflect the specific skills and experiences mentioned in the job description. We want to see how your background aligns with our needs, especially in NLP techniques relevant to African languages.
Be Clear and Concise: When writing your application, keep it straightforward and to the point. Use clear language to explain your technical expertise and how you can contribute to our multidisciplinary team. We appreciate clarity!
Apply Through Our Website: Don’t forget to submit your application through our official website. This ensures that we receive all your details correctly and helps us keep track of your application efficiently. We can't wait to hear from you!
How to prepare for a job interview at GSM Conference Services
✨Know Your NLP Inside Out
Make sure you brush up on your knowledge of NLP techniques, especially those relevant to African languages. Be ready to discuss specific methods you've used in the past, like tokenisation strategies or evaluation methods, and how they can be applied to low-resource languages.
✨Showcase Your Data Analysis Skills
Prepare to talk about your experience with data analysis. Think of examples where you've identified linguistic patterns or bias risks in datasets. This will demonstrate your analytical rigour and ability to improve representation across African languages.
✨Communicate Clearly and Effectively
Practice explaining complex technical concepts in simple terms. You’ll need to communicate with a diverse range of stakeholders, so being able to translate your insights into accessible language is key. Consider role-playing with a friend to refine your communication style.
✨Demonstrate Your Collaborative Spirit
Be prepared to discuss how you've worked with various teams in the past. Highlight your experience in stakeholder management and how you’ve ensured alignment on linguistic priorities and data quality. Showing that you can work well in a multidisciplinary team will set you apart.