Chief Product Officer

The role 

The CPO will own the ARK product during a pivotal scale-up year. The role requires public
health leadership with a strong understanding of digital health use cases and the application of AI in health.
We are looking for someone who has deep clinical and public health understanding, has the experience of working closely with ministries, public health agencies and donor institutions, understands what it takes to get surveillance, early
warning systems, investment intelligence tools, decision support platforms for supply chains, and others adopted and sustained in practice, and can translate that into product priorities for our engineering and data-science teams. 

You will lead review of the ARK platform to elevate its enterprise readiness, advise country deployments of ARK ecosystem products
across different regions; set product and institutional requirements and priorities for the infrastructure, security, and privacy upgrades our engineering team is delivering; guide integration of ARK's API gateway with national health information systems; and act as IMACS's primary counterpart to client organizations. 

Key responsibilities 

Product strategy and roadmap 

• Define product roadmap and release priorities, grounded in the real decision needs of national public health programs, global health security initiatives, and diverse public health stakeholders. 

• Prioritize disease and use-case coverage in line with country demand and IMACS's R&D agenda and establish and report product metrics on adoption, reliability, data coverage and timeliness, and decision impact to IMACS leadership and funders. 

Country deployments and adoption 

• Lead operational strengthening of existing deployments in Asian and African countries, working directly with ministries of health and national public health institutes. 

• Design and operationalize a repeatable country-onboarding pipeline, including data agreements, data-steward roles, and governance arrangements that respect national data sovereignty. 

Interoperability and integration 

• Lead institutional engagement for opening of ARK's API gateway to national health systems and integration partners, setting integration standards, access controls, and partner support processes. 

• Define and validate workflow requirement for ARK to interoperate with the platforms countries already run, including national health information systems, laboratory and AMR surveillance systems, and meteorological data services. 

Platform infrastructure, security, and privacy 

• Set product requirements and acceptance criteria for the engineering team's move to self-scaling, multi-region infrastructure, including tiered AI request routing and demand-spike protection, and hold delivery to timeline. 

• Define the institutional security and data-governance expectations ARK must meet for ministries, enterprises, and multilaterals (data-access auditing, change management, incident response) and shepherd the platform through a formal review and assessment. 

Evidence, evaluation, and partnerships 

• Serve as the primary technical counterpart to the independent evaluation of ARK, particularly on forecasting accuracy versus baseline methods, citation and recommendation reliability, usability across skill levels, and data coverage and timeliness. 

• Lead the drafting of high-quality publications and presentations and represent IMACS with the donors, UN agencies, regional public health institutions, development banks, enterprises, and other development partners. 

What you bring 

Required 

• An advanced degree in public health, epidemiology, medicine, health services research, or a closely related field. 

• 12+ years of experience in clinical and health settings, preferably infectious disease surveillance, epidemic preparedness, or health systems strengthening, including substantial time working with or within ministries of health in Africa and/or Asia. 

• Direct experience with digital health architecture and data interoperability in low- and middle-income countries, including introducing or transitioning ministries onto national health information platforms, and with national data-sovereignty considerations. 

• Experience managing or providing technical leadership to multi-country, donor-funded investments, including work planning, budgets, and results monitoring. 

• Established working relationships with donors, UN agencies, regional public health institutions, development banks, enterprises, and other development partners. 

• Applied epidemiological and analytical skills sufficient to judge model outputs and guide data scientists. 

• Excellent written and verbal English; proven ability to convene expert groups, synthesize evidence, and communicate technical trade-offs to senior government and donor audiences. 

Preferred 

• Clinical background and frontline outbreak-response experience. 

• Expertise in antimicrobial resistance and One Health surveillance. 

• Familiarity with WHO normative processes such as technical advisory groups, guideline development, or IHR (2005) implementation. 

Travel requirement 

• Willingness to travel internationally, estimated 25–30%. 

Terms of employment 

This is a fixed-term, full-time position running through 30 June 2027

How to apply 

Please submit a CV and a brief cover letter (no more than one page) describing a surveillance or digital health system you helped a ministry adopt and sustain, and what you would do differently.