Machine Learning and Operations Consultant

About this role

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is recruiting a Machine Learning and Operations Consultant to support the NDIZI project, which builds the SIKIA voice-first, multimodal AI platform for conversational data collection and analysis. The work sits within CGIAR's global research partnership and is based at the Alliance office in Arusha, Tanzania. The consultant will support end-to-end MLOps workflows spanning data ingestion, validation, dataset versioning, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement across cloud and edge environments. Day-to-day work includes refining multilingual automatic speech recognition pipelines, deploying large language model workflows for conversational analysis and trait extraction, and optimising inference for low-connectivity settings.

The post-holder will also build multimodal pipelines linking speech, transcripts, metadata, and field images, and develop AI workflows for plant disease detection and severity scoring that feed into the SIKIA and ONA platforms. Further responsibilities cover CI/CD pipelines, experiment tracking, model registries, monitoring, and integration of retrieval-augmented generation into agentic deployments. Applicants must hold a master's degree in computer science, data science, artificial intelligence, or a related field, with at least three years of experience in machine learning engineering, MLOps, or AI system deployment. Strong Python programming and familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow are required, alongside experience with cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure and with NLP, speech technologies, conversational AI, or LLM applications.

Experience with multimodal AI, computer vision, or image-based workflows is desirable, as is a background in agriculture or international research environments. This is a nationally recruited, full-time consultancy of up to 11 months with potential extension, working with research machine learning, software engineering, product, and field teams. The total consultancy value is 90,000,000 Tanzanian Shillings, payable against five deliverables. Applications should be submitted through the Alliance careers portal with a CV, technical proposal, and financial proposal, quoting reference MACHINE LEARNING AND OPERATIONS CONSULTANCY, by 30 October 2026.