Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer, AI

Job Title: Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer, AI

Reports To: Manager, Product & Engineering, AI (UGHE, CTLT)

Location: University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), Rwanda

Purpose of the Job

Reporting to the Manager, Product & Engineering, the Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer focuses on the security, hosting, and integration of the OneSpaceAfrica (OSA) platform as it expands from UGHE to institutions across the Consortium of Medical Schools in Africa (COMS-A). The role works alongside the frontend and backend engineers and owns the day-to-day operation, reliability, automation, and security implementation of OSA's cloud infrastructure. It (i) works on the cloud infrastructure the platform runs on, so that environments are reproducible, monitored and recoverable, (ii) helps protect platform data, including privacy, security, and data sovereignty by institution and country, and (iii) helps build infrastructure that can serve many institutions, including those with limited connectivity, and (iv) prepares each partner institution technically for launch and integrates OSA with its systems. OSA is designed for rollout across a variety of regulatory environments, resource constraints, and access requirements. Each new institution and country adds its own requirements for data hosting, privacy, and integration. The first year of the role is the UGHE platform: bringing infrastructure fully under version control, establishing monitoring and alerting, proving recovery, and making environments reproducible. The multi-institution work follows from that foundation. Learning.ai is a growing team and several of the roles referenced here are being recruited alongside this one.

Key Responsibilities

1. Works on the cloud infrastructure end to end, including networking, compute, storage and databases, defined in code and deployed through a reviewed pipeline rather than by hand.
2. Maintains the development, staging and production environments, keeping them consistent and reproducible.
3. Maintains monitoring, alerting, and incident response, so that failures are detected by the platform rather than reported by a user, and so that alerts reach a person.
4. Maintains backup and recovery, including tested restores rather than configured backups.
5. Tracks infrastructure cost by environment and service, and flags where it is growing faster than use.
6. Owns the implementation of infrastructure and platform security controls, including identity and access controls, encryption, secrets management, vulnerability management, infrastructure protection, security monitoring, and technical controls required for data hosting and data sovereignty. Legal, regulatory, and policy interpretation remains with UGHE's contracts team and the regulatory advisor.
7. Works with the Strategic Operations Manager on the data management plan and implements data protection for research use, including de-identification with a stable pseudonymous identifier, separation of personal practice data from institutional content, and exclusion of student-uploaded material from any shared dataset.
8. Manages vendor and third-party risk, including OSA's dependence on third-party AI model APIs.
9. Leads technical incident response and business continuity planning, including runbooks for outages, security incidents, breaches, and other disruptions, and coordinates security testing, vulnerability remediation, and follow-up actions with the engineering team.
10. Designs and implements infrastructure for scalability and multi-tenancy, so that new institutions can be onboarded without a separate build for each one, with major architecture and security decisions reviewed with the Manager, Product & Engineering and, where appropriate, the Senior Advisor, Engineering and Infrastructure.
11. Supports the platform's low-bandwidth and offline commitments on the infrastructure side, working with the frontend and backend engineers, who own the application side.
12. Monitors infrastructure performance from pilots through wider rollout, and shares the data with the Strategic Operations Manager for evaluation baselines.
13. Leads technical readiness assessments at partner institutions, evaluating connectivity, device access, and data systems, and identifying the gaps to close before launch, working with the Partner Success Coordinator.
14. Assesses the technical feasibility of proposed features and use cases against each institution's readiness.
15. Handles systems integrations with partner institutions, including identity and single sign-on, and guides frontline engineering support, including consultants, on data, security, and integration issues.

Qualifications, Knowledge, and Skills

a. Academic qualifications

● Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field.

b. Experience

• 2+ years of professional experience in software engineering, infrastructure, cloud engineering, security, or DevOps work, with demonstrated hands-on responsibility for production systems
• Familiarity with research data practices such as de-identification and consent management; experience with health or education data preferred
• Exposure to third-party vendor and API risk management preferred
• Exposure to multi-tenant or multi-institution platform architecture preferred
• Experience building for low-bandwidth or offline-first environments preferred
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), identity and single sign-on integration, CI/CD, monitoring, and incident response
• Experience with infrastructure as code, Terraform preferred
• Preferably with experience in systems relevant to education and digital learning, with exposure to Learning Management Systems (LMS) or similar platforms.
• Preferably with exposure to AI and machine learning concepts, and comfort working with modern AI-powered tools or frameworks.

c. Technical competencies

• Solid foundation in cybersecurity and data privacy in a software product, including encryption, access controls, and vulnerability management
• Strong technical skills and willingness to troubleshoot problems as they arise
• Ability to explain technical requirements to non-technical staff at partner institutions
• Excellent oral and written communication skills in English; English proficiency required
• French and/or Kinyarwanda proficiency preferred

d. Behavioral competencies

• Excellent communication and teamwork skills; this is a collaborative team and clear communication is as valued as clean code.
• Curiosity, adaptability, and a genuine commitment to continuous learning.

How to Apply

Applicants should provide: (1) curriculum vitae, (2) degree, (3) a cover letter describing your interest in UGHE and relevant experience. Please upload these under the ‘Additional Files’ tab on the application page.

University of Global Health Equity is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Organizational Profile

UGHE is a new kind of university focused on training the next generation of global leaders in health care delivery. The university launched in Rwanda in September 2015. Through an academic experience uniquely rooted in the values of equity, students are empowered to both ease suffering at the bedside and drive transformational, systemic changes to the health system.

UGHE is an initiative of Partners In Health (PIH), an internationally recognized non-profit organization whose mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care. In over nearly three decades of operating alongside public sectors in countries around the world, PIH has developed a model to deliver high quality healthcare to some of the world’s most marginalized communities. Nowhere has this impact been more profound than in Rwanda, where Inshuti Mu Buzima—PIH’s sister organization—and our government partners have driven innovation for a decade.

Members of the UGHE community are tenacious and resolute in our drive to attain social justice, make common cause with those in need, listen to and learn from others, and operate with honesty and humility as we uphold academic integrity and intellectual curiosity. The University of Global Health Equity seeks individuals committed to these values to join the team.

Commitment to Safeguarding and Prevention of Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Sexual Harassment

At UGHE, we are committed to ensuring that those who benefit from our work—including community members—as well as our students, contractors, staff, and visitors to our campus are treated with dignity and respect and protected from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment and any form of systemic abuse, whilst reducing risk and vulnerabilities. A range of pre-employment checks will be undertaken in conformity with UGHE’s policy.

UGHE will request information from applicants’ previous employers about any findings of fraud, harassment, sexual harassment and any form of systemic abuse or incidents under investigation when the applicant left employment. By applying, the job applicant confirms their understanding of these recruitment procedures.