Code for Africa (CfA), through the InclusionAI Research Network, with the A+ Alliance, is offering a 6 month fellowship for an AI Engineer, anywhere in the world, to join our TechLab in implementing an AI Innovation Sandbox.
The AI Innovation Sandbox is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) designed to support women-led and women-focused organisations across Sub-Saharan Africa to build meaningful, ethical AI tools for their communities.
Through the fellowship, you will architect AI strategy and implementation. You will own how we adopt, adapt, and deploy AI across multiple products and those of our partner organisations. The core of this role is building with AI: designing agent systems that do real work, engineering the context that makes models useful, evaluating whether what you’ve built actually holds up in the real world, and iterating until it does.
This is an AI Engineer role, not an ML Engineer role. We’re looking for someone who builds systems and products using AI — with enough understanding of how models work to make good decisions, not necessarily to train them from scratch.
The successful candidates will work as part of a multinational and multilingual team using digital collaboration tools to create content for a global audience and international media partners.
Required: minimum requirements include:
- 4+ years building and shipping software, with meaningful hands-on experience building AI-powered products or systems
- Fluency in Python and TypeScript
- Demonstrated experience designing and building agentic AI systems: multi-step task execution, tool use, memory, planning, and error recovery
- Strong context engineering instincts: you think about the full information architecture a model needs to be useful, not just how to phrase a prompt
- A systematic approach to evals: you design for measurability, not just intuition, and you know how to tell whether an AI feature is actually working
- Familiarity with the broader AI ecosystem: open-source tooling alongside commercial APIs and nonprofit access programmes from leading labs
- Strong system design instincts around AI: you think about latency, fallbacks, cost, and reliability, not just model quality
- Sound judgement on responsible AI: bias, fairness, transparency, and the limits of what a model should be asked to do
- The ability to communicate clearly across the room: to an engineer debugging a pipeline and to a journalist or funder asking what it all means
- Fluency in English
- A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent experience you can point to through your work and portfolio
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:
- Experience deploying open-source LLMs in production environments
- Existing relationships or experience working with AI lab programmes: Anthropic for Startups/Nonprofits, OpenAI for Nonprofits, Google.org AI access, or similar
- Familiarity with vector databases, embedding models, and knowledge graph approaches
- Experience with multimodal AI systems
- Background in containerisation and cloud infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud-hosted model deployment)
- Experience in civic technology, investigative journalism, international development, or human rights contexts
- Experience with multilingual NLP, particularly for low-resource or African languages
- Fluency in French, Arabic, KiSwahili, or another major African language
- Experience working across international, cross-cultural technical teams
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: Fully remote — open to candidates anywhere in the world, with a preference for those based in Africa
- Languages: English required; French, Arabic, KiSwahili, or any other major African language is a significant advantage