[Hiring] Freelance Senior Technical Advisor @Projects by IF

Role Description

In this role, you’ll be a senior technical advisor to city governments across North, Central and South America, working in both an advisory and a hands-on capacity to help them design, build and launch small scale pilots of new services for residents.

Working alongside experienced product managers, data scientists, AI engineers, and designers, you’ll help multidisciplinary city teams build in-house product development capability by prototyping and delivering digital products and services, many of which harness data and AI.

You won’t own the decisions, but you’ll shape them. You’ll guide cities through the full product development lifecycle, helping them weigh the strategic and technical trade-offs at each stage:

• Design system and data architecture that’s right-sized for a pilot but built to scale.
• Prototype and test possible solutions to validate assumptions.
• Determine when AI approaches such as machine learning or large language models are the right tool (and when they aren’t).

You’ll roll up your sleeves to prototype and demonstrate what good looks like, while making sure your clients understand the reasoning well enough to own the outcome.

This role suits someone with the technical depth of a tech lead, and the judgement, communication skills and patience to lead through influence rather than authority. You’ll need to work fluently in English and in at least one of Spanish or Portuguese.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on technical experience, with strong knowledge of system and data architecture, data pipelines, DevOps and infrastructure.
• Track record of delivering and deploying robust solutions end to end, from prototype to pilot, across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments.
• Familiarity with AI and machine learning approaches, including large language models.
• Experience taking products from early concept to first release, while laying foundations for scale.
• Experience working in multidisciplinary teams, collaborating closely with product managers, designers and other disciplines throughout the product lifecycle.
• The ability to explain technical ideas and trade-offs clearly to audiences of all technical levels.
• Experience setting technical direction for a project or small team and guiding other engineers.
• Experience influencing technical decisions you don't directly control.
• Curiosity and flexibility in problem solving, and comfort working through ambiguity and uncertainty in complex environments.
• Professional working proficiency in English and in Spanish and/or Portuguese.

Requirements

• Experience working with multicultural teams and on international projects.
• Experience working with government or other public-sector organisations.
• Familiarity with responsible AI practices, such as data privacy, bias and fairness, transparency, and governance considerations specific to public-sector use of AI.
• Experience supporting organisations to build their own technical capability.

Company Description