The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT seeks a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) Consultant for its NDIZI project, to support the development, deployment and operationalization of machine learning systems that power SIKIA, a voice-first and multimodal AI platform. The consultant will work across speech, NLP, multimodal AI and agentic pipelines and move models from research prototypes to reliable field deployment. This is an 11-month full-time consultancy (with potential extension) based at the Alliance office in Arusha, with a total estimated consultancy amount of TZS 90,000,000.
Responsibilities
- Support deployment and optimization of multilingual ASR pipelines for cloud and mobile environments.
- Develop workflows for speech data ingestion, transcription, evaluation, and continuous model improvement.
- Implement automated retraining and fine-tuning pipelines using newly collected field data.
- Support deployment of LLM-based workflows for conversational analysis and trait extraction.
- Monitor model performance, latency, reliability, and drift under field conditions.
- Optimize inference workflows for low-connectivity and resource-constrained environments.
- Support development of multimodal pipelines linking speech, transcripts, metadata, and field images collected through SIKIA.
- Implement workflows for multimodal data validation, synchronization, storage, annotation, and dataset versioning.
- Support training, deployment, and evaluation of multimodal and visual-language AI models.
- Develop scalable workflows for managing multimodal datasets and model outputs across cloud infrastructure.
- Support benchmarking, reproducibility, and optimization of multimodal AI pipelines for field deployment.
- Support development and deployment of AI workflows for disease detection and severity scoring using field images and multimodal data.
- Implement data and evaluation pipelines for disease annotation, validation, benchmarking, and continuous model improvement.
- Support integration of disease scoring workflows within the SIKIA and ONA platforms for field-based data collection and analysis.
- Develop CI/CD pipelines for model training, evaluation, and deployment.
- Manage experiment tracking, model registries, and dataset versioning workflows.
- Implement monitoring and logging across ML services.
- Collaborate with the software development team to integrate RAG pipelines into an Agentic deployment structure.
- Support deployment of ML services on GCP, FAIRGrounds, and related infrastructure.
- Support integration of ML services within the SIKIA platform across mobile, backend, API, and cloud systems.
- Ensure compliance with data governance, security, and responsible AI requirements.
Requirements
- Master’s degree in computer science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- At least 3 years of experience in Machine Learning engineering, MLOps, or deployment of AI systems.
- Experience building and managing ML workflows, including model training, deployment, monitoring, and versioning.
- Strong programming skills in Python.
- Familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Experience working with cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
- Strong experience with NLP, speech technologies, conversational AI, or LLM-based applications.
- Experience with multimodal AI, computer vision, or image-based AI workflows is desirable.
- Ability to work collaboratively across technical, product, and field teams.
- Strong communication, documentation, and problem-solving skills.
- Background or experience in agriculture, digital agriculture, or international research environments.
- MLOps
- Python
- PyTorch / TensorFlow
- Speech and NLP
- LLM Applications
- CI/CD
- Google Cloud Platform
Document Requirements
Application Instructions
- Quote the reference Ref: MACHINE LEARNING AND OPERATIONS CONSULTANCY.
- Save your CV, technical proposal and financial proposal as one document named with your last name and first name.
- Email applications will not be considered.
