Technical Product Manager

The Role

We are growing our technical team to meet accelerating demand from our portfolio. As part of that growth, we are hiring a Technical Product Manager who will work at the heart of our accelerator — embedded with 3-4 NGO partners at a time, leading product engagements end-to-end, and helping shape how we deliver at scale.

The TPM is a senior, delivery-focused role that sits at the center of TAF's accelerator work. You will split your time roughly 50/50 between partner-facing and internal-facing work: on one side, building trusted relationships with NGO partners and translating their needs into actionable product roadmaps; on the other, driving execution with TAF's engineering team through structured agile processes.

You will get your hands dirty by building dashboards, scoping data pipelines, designing A/B tests, and unblocking engineers. You are expected to be as comfortable in SQL query as you are in a partner discovery call. Within 90 days, you should have sufficient agency to run engagements independently. Within a year, you should be training others.

What You'll Do

Partner engagement (50%):

• Act as the primary interface with 3-4 NGO partners at any given time (building trust, scoping collaborations, and surfacing pain points through structured discovery)
• Translate partner needs into roadmaps and technical advisory on product, data, evaluation, and experimentation
• Report back on learnings from partner work, trace patterns across different organizations and help releasing the lessons learnt in the public goods that benefit the whole sector

Product & engineering execution (50%):

• Get your hands dirty with partner's platforms: build dashboards, data pipelines, AI evaluations and production integrations, analyze data to extract trends, run AB tests and perform user research
• Define and drive product roadmaps across TAF's tools translating complex partner workflows into clear engineering requirements. Run agile sprints with TAF's engineering team
• Ship critical features and own the full loop from partner need to shipped product to feedback

Team and talent (ongoing):

• Coach partner organization staff in the process, help upskilling their technical and leadership skills, help them hire for critical roles
• Coach and mentor Lighthouse Fellows on how to navigate nonprofit partners, run structured engagements, and operate effectively in a resource-constrained environment
• Contribute to TAF's internal playbook: document what works, codify engagement frameworks, and help build the institutional knowledge that makes us better over time

What Success Looks Like

At 90 days:

• Fully ramped: you have independent agency with at least two NGO partners, are running your own sprint cadence, and are making decisions without needing to escalate routine calls
• First quick win delivered: at least one experiment run, a feature shipped, a dashboard built with a partner

At one year:

• You have led 3-4 partner organizations engagement end-to-end, producing meaningful technical outcomes that led to tangible improvements for the users they serve
• You are training others - coaching or hiring partner organization staff and Fellows on how to operate effectively in this context
• You have meaningfully contributed to how TAF does this work: a framework improved, a process documented, a playbook built

Remote (Sub-Saharan African or South Asia)

• Flexible time zone

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years of experience in technical product management, solutions engineering, or tech consulting — ideally with both client/consumer-facing and engineering-facing responsibilities
• You have shipped AI/LLM product features, data pipelines or warehouses, and production APIs — not just managed people who did, but actually built alongside them
• You can read and write SQL, navigate a codebase, build data pipelines and dashboards
• You have demonstrated experience using quantitative and qualitative methods to define problem statements, measure the effectiveness for causal inference (AB tests etc.) or predictive analytics. You can design a study, interpret the results, and present them to a non-technical program director
• You are fluent in agile: sprints, backlog grooming, estimation, retrospectives. You run these processes well even when the team is small and everyone is wearing multiple hats
• You can demonstrate you've managed competing stakeholder needs across engineers, behavioral scientists, and NGO program teams — without formal authority over any of them

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience with global development data stacks: ODK, DHIS2, Kobo, Metabase, dbt, or similar
• Familiarity with the evidence-based development ecosystem — J-PAL, IPA, IDinsight, or similar RCT/MEL contexts
• Have proven experience of scaling products with data-driven approaches
• Exposure to GenAI product development — evaluation frameworks, prompt engineering, LLM integrations
• You have a meaningful track record in a low-resource, mission-driven, or Tech for International Development context