Sr. Research Associate, Data Management and Analytics

About this role

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, part of CGIAR, seeks a Senior Research Associate for Data Management and Analytics in Arusha, Tanzania. The post-holder will plan and oversee data management and analytics across the NDIZI and Google.org projects, developing data strategies, tracking milestones, and organising data collection, processing, quality assurance, and reporting across multiple field sites and partner institutions. The role leads planning of the project's data infrastructure and prepares high-quality datasets for artificial intelligence model development aimed at accelerating crop improvement and food security. Day to day, the associate manages the integration and governance of datasets drawn from field trials, image repositories, partner institutions, and digital platforms, and maintains data documentation, metadata standards, and data dictionaries.

The post-holder leads design and optimisation of machine learning processing pipelines, handles multi-modal data covering images, speech, text, and tabular records, and conducts exploratory analysis and statistical summaries. Quality control is central: designing validation procedures, cleaning and verifying data, and advising the AI team on preprocessing needs. The associate also oversees annotation and labelling for supervised learning, mentors junior data staff, and represents the data function in donor reporting. Applicants need a master's degree in agricultural sciences, computer science, data science, or a related field, at least three years of relevant experience, and demonstrated supervisory experience.

Proficiency in SQL and NoSQL databases, cloud storage platforms, ETL pipeline design, data visualisation, Git version control, and Python is required, alongside familiarity with FAIR data principles, annotation platforms, machine learning frameworks, and agricultural or plant sciences. Desirable additions include speech, text, and image processing, metadata standards, LLM-based analytics, and international agricultural research experience. This is a nationally recruited, one-year renewable contract graded at BG07, with a minimum basic salary of TZS 3,929,704 plus insurance, retirement, training, and flexible working benefits. Applications close on 14 October 2026 via the Alliance careers portal, quoting reference RFP 301433.