Data & AI Engineer - Contract to Hire

Technical Focus

The assignment focuses on applying data engineering and AI techniques to support key analytical processes. The incumbent will design, build, and operationalise advanced data and artificial intelligence capabilities within the IPC Analysis Platform to enable the delivery of AI-assisted analytical workflows that support faster, more consistent, and more scalable IPC analyses—while preserving IPC’s human-led, consensus-based approach.

In this role, the Data & AI Engineer will own the end-to-end lifecycle of the AI Analyst stack: from data ingestion and structuring, through ML and LLM-enabled intelligence, to deployment, monitoring, and improvement in production environments. The position requires hands-on implementation of NLP, Machine Learning (ML), Generative AI, and agentic AI approaches responsibly in close collaboration with analysts, data scientists, and software engineers.

Tasks and responsibilities:

Data Engineering & Preparation

• Design and implement data pipelines for ingestion, cleaning, and transformation of structured and unstructured data.
• Develop workflows for automated quantitative data processing and integration.
• Implement methods for extracting and structuring qualitative/text data from diverse sources (e.g., PDFs, dashboards, web content).
• Design, build, and maintain scalable data architectures that support AI-enabled analytical workflows within the IPC Analysis Platform.
• Establish monitoring, logging, and observability mechanisms to ensure data pipelines and AI services remain reliable and auditable in production.

AI, ML and GenAI Systems

• Contribute to the development of a practical AI strategy for the IPC, including: identification and prioritisation of high-impact AI use cases across the analytical workflow, definition of guiding principles for responsible human-in-the-loop AI use, and recommendations on tools, architectures, and approaches aligned with IPC needs and constraints
• Design and implement AI-enabled services that support analytical decision-making and evidence synthesis within the Analysis Platform.
• Preprocess, curate, and structure datasets for machine learning and LLM-based applications, including text preparation for NLP tasks.
• Build, fine-tune, and evaluate ML and LLM-based systems using appropriate frameworks and methodologies.
• Implement retrieval-based AI patterns (e.g. semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation) to enable intelligent use of large evidence repositories.
• Contribute to prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and multi-step reasoning pipelines that reflect IPC analytical logic.
• Ensure AI outputs are explainable, traceable, and clearly presented for human review and validation.

Collaboration & Knowledge Transfer

• Work embedded within cross-functional teams, collaborating closely with IPC analysts, technical leads, data scientists, and software developers to integrate AI components into the platform.
• Translate analytical and methodological requirements into practical data and AI system designs.
• Clearly document architectures, pipelines, models, and design decisions for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to internal and external capacity building and knowledge transfer