Hi, I am sharing this opportunity for a senior role (>8 or 10 years experience) that opened recently in my team. This position is in an exciting and influential position to shape and guide a wider division strategy towards internal open source policy and programmes.
Full details below:
UNICEF, Innovation Manager (Emerging Tech), Stockholm, Sweden
About position
1. Contribute to and execute the strategy for portfolio of early-stage open source pilots.
- Inform investment strategy contributing expertise and networks in frontier technology trends
- Propose regularly new technology applications and areas for consideration
- Input into selection and assessment processes for pilots and assessments of results with a focus on ensuring alignment with novelty, latest technology developments, technical quality assurance and standards and potential for scaling
2. Provide technical support to various portfolios across UNICEF Country Offices and external companies focusing on the following results:
- Develop, maintain and manage team resources across priority frontier tech areas, including relevant staff and consultants
- Develop and oversee execution of relevant technical standards to guide development, piloting and acceleration of frontier tech solutions in the Fund portfolio and the Ventures team
- Design and develop a pool of technical expertise for COs, hubs and others to access for assistance to specific projects
- Provide ongoing support to individual early stage projects and pilots to ensure alignment with best practices, relevant standards and in line with market developments
3. Provide thought leadership and maintain knowledge sharing strategy on frontier technology.
- Tracking of relevant technology and market trends as they relate to UNICEF priorities and strategies
- Develop market studies and trends analyses across frontier technology areas
- Translate trends and opportunities into guidance for early-stage portfolio of investments and projects
- Develop and implement knowledge capture and sharing strategy to increase access across OOI
4. Oversee product development, strategy and team by developing and applying relevant technical standards and practices.
- Identify opportunities for in-house digital product and infrastructure development to support early stage and acceleration of frontier solutions
- Oversee related product development strategies and teams for priority platforms, including for acceleration of promising solutions from the Fund portfolio
- Develop product standards and oversee adherence across the team’s and Fund’s portfolio, including alignment with open source practices, the Digital Public Goods standards and other development standards
- Collaborate with relevant internal divisions where relevant to ensure compliance and packaging of solutions and platforms for internal use across UNICEF
5. Maintain and coordinate UNICEF Ventures’ open source leadership and expertise.
- Oversee Ventures’ online presence and repositories, including alignment to best practices
- Explore models for technical guidance on open source for OOI and UNICEF
- Guide UNICEF’s technical engagement in relevant platforms, like the Digital Public Goods Alliance
6. Provide inputs to strategic decisions, team and budget management and oversight of Ventures, focusing on the following results:
- Provide strategic guidance and prioritization across work areas
- Representation to internal and external stakeholders, as requested, to ensure consistent participation in priority processes and events
Qualifications
Academic Degrees:
- An advanced university degree (Master’s or higher) in Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related areas
- A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
Required Professional Experience:
A minimum of 8 years of relevant professional experience:
- Demonstrated leadership, strategy and management level experience for development of technical platforms, especially those leveraging blockchain and artificial intelligence
- Demonstrated technical expertise in frontier technology areas, including market trends, main stakeholders, best practices and standards
- A track record of architecting and prototyping systems rapidly within large open conceptual spaces and across different technology platforms and areas, in line with industry best practice and standards
- Experience in coding and building technology products and well developed, extensive open source experience with demonstrated track record as individual contributor and of own open source development
- Experience engaging at senior levels with stakeholders in the open source, digital public goods and frontier technology space
- Ability to think ahead in terms of product and engineering implications for potential design, understanding of engineering considerations and tradeoffs for different product and business decisions
- Experience in establishing, growing and managing global teams, including project teams for specific initiatives
- Experience working in a headquarters environment of a multi-national entity desirable
- Ability to synthesize technical information and translate it into accessible products and systems
- A strong understanding of UNICEF’s mission and vision as well as its programmes through direct or indirect work experience with UNICEF
- Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.
- Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.
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About UNICEF Office of Innovation
UNICEF has a 75-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.
The Office of Innovation (OoI) works to catalyse UNICEF’s and all its partners’ expertise and resources against key children-outcomes bottlenecks, with a view to continuously ideate and scale the most effective solutions with transformational potential at scale against the child-related SDGs.
The office is doing this by continuously exploring new ways of accelerating results for children, investing across a range of early-stage open source solutions, and harnessing internal and external expertise towards continuously iterating and finetuning the most promising solutions for children through a systematic portfolio management approach, and leveraging all stakeholders’ innovation energy, knowhow and resources from intergovernmental, multilateral, private sector and non-governmental fora (think tank, academia).