Machine Learning Operations Consultant

About this role

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is seeking a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) Consultant for an 11-month full-time consultancy supporting the NDIZI (NLP to Develop and Innovate Zero-shot Intelligence) project. The consultant will develop, deploy, and operationalize machine learning systems powering SIKIA, a voice-first and multimodal AI platform designed for conversational agricultural data collection and analysis, as well as related AI-driven research workflows. The work spans speech, natural language processing, multimodal AI, and agentic pipelines, with the goal of transitioning models and data systems from research prototypes into reliable, scalable solutions suitable for real-world field deployment in support of crop improvement systems.

Core responsibilities include supporting end-to-end MLOps workflows covering data ingestion, validation, dataset versioning, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement across both cloud and edge environments. The consultant will collaborate closely with research ML, software engineering, product, and field teams to ensure systems remain robust, maintainable, and aligned with project needs. Specific duties encompass refining multilingual automatic speech recognition pipelines, developing multimodal workflows linking speech, transcripts, metadata, and field images, supporting AI-based disease detection and severity scoring, and managing CI/CD pipelines, experiment tracking, model registries, and monitoring infrastructure on GCP and FAIRGrounds.

The role requires a Master's degree in computer science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, or a related field, alongside at least three years of experience in ML engineering, MLOps, or AI system deployment. The position is based in Arusha, Tanzania, with an alternative duty station of Nairobi, Kenya, and offers a total honoraria of TZS 68,000,000 or KES 3,423,313 structured across five deliverables spanning the 11-month assignment. Applications close on 21 June 2026.