ML & Operations Consultant, Computer Vision

About this role

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is recruiting consultants for a Machine Learning and Operations Consultancy focused on computer vision. The consultancy sits within the Alliance's digital phenotyping work, which applies artificial intelligence to plant breeding across the CGIAR network. The post-holder will support end-to-end MLOps workflows spanning data ingestion, validation, dataset versioning, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring in cloud and edge environments, working closely with research, engineering, product, and field teams. Day-to-day responsibilities include developing, fine-tuning, and optimising computer vision models for crop phenotyping across diverse field conditions.

The consultant will build automated workflows for image preprocessing, feature engineering, and annotation curation, and will run hyperparameter tuning, model validation experiments, and benchmarking against baseline datasets. They will also maintain scalable end-to-end machine learning pipelines, implement CI/CD processes, and manage version control for datasets, code, and model artifacts. Further duties cover disease detection and severity scoring, integration of machine learning services within the ONA platform across mobile, backend, API, and cloud systems, and deployment on GCP and AWS infrastructure, alongside monitoring and responsible AI compliance. Applicants must hold a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, data science, artificial intelligence, software engineering, or a related field.

Required skills include experience building and managing machine learning workflows, strong Python programming skills, familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow, cloud platform experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure, and knowledge of containerisation tools like Docker and Kubernetes. A background in agriculture, digital agriculture, or international research environments is an added advantage. The consultancy runs for up to 11 months on a full-time basis, with potential for extension, and based at the Alliance office in Arusha, Tanzania, or Nairobi, Kenya. The estimated total consultancy fee is 90,000,000 Tanzanian shillings or 4,423,212 Kenyan shillings, paid against four deliverables.

Applications close on 30 October 2026 via the Alliance jobs portal, with a CV, technical proposal, and financial proposal required.