About The AI Access InitiativeWe're at an inflection point in artificial intelligence – presenting both tremendous potential opportunity and risk for people in developing countries: rather than allowing the poverty gap to expand, low-income countries have an opportunity to leapfrog development milestones with AI-powered innovations. Incubated at Evidence Action, we’re launching The AI Access Initiative, an organization focused on scaling AI-enabled ‘big bets’ to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of people in poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We will operate at the intersection of global development actors, top AI labs, and leading researchers to drive meaningful access to the benefits of AI for the 3.5 billion people living in poverty globally. We will create “public good,” open-sourced playbooks, toolkits, and insights that define how to design and launch tractable and impactful AI-enabled programs. Given the scale of opportunity, we expect our portfolio to expand substantially, but to start, we’re scaling two programs focused on AI in Agriculture and AI in Health.We are led by former Evidence Action CEO Kanika Bahl, a founding member of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, and advised by Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; and Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs for Alphabet and Google. This work builds on Evidence Action’s track record reaching 530M+ people with cost-effective, evidence-based programs across 9 countries in Africa and Asia, with a focus on last-mile delivery.Our approachWe’re scaling AI-enabled big bets to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of individuals living in poverty. We will focus both on delivering near-term, tractable direct impact and supporting governments to establish an enabling environment for the ‘AI for Good’ ecosystem, including: Launching AI-enabled interventions to impact tens or hundreds of millions, such as delivering AI-enabled forecasts to smallholder farmers to improve yields and earnings, leveraging AI to dramatically improve medical diagnosis and treatment, implementing frontier systems to identify and mitigate disease outbreaks, or putting personalized AI tutors into the hands of students to drive reductions to system-level educational attainment gaps. As part of this work, we will create “public good,” open-sourced playbooks, toolkits, and insights that define how to design and launch tractable and impactful AI-enabled programs. When relevant, we will partner with leading AI labs to shape technical offerings, including adapting for underrepresented languages, bandwidth constraints, etc.Partnering with governments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to drive regulatory changes, policy, and investments necessary to unlock beneficial use cases at national scale, while proactively mitigating the downside risks of AI.Building on our recent analysis of near and medium-term AI opportunities in LMICs, we are advancing the highest-scoring interventions through a rigorous vetting process, including evidence reviews, cost-effectiveness analyses, risk assessments, and early operational/technical scoping. We are excited about the opportunity to deliver, and are now running deeper analysis on opportunities in global health.The RoleWe are seeking a high-ownership and rigorous finance and operations leader to help architect the institutional backbone of a rapidly scaling AI-focused global development organization. This founding role will partner closely with the CEO and leadership team on financial strategy, organizational scaling, and operational infrastructure. While incubated at Evidence Action, we plan to spin out in Q4 '26.The right person thrives at the intersection of institutional rigor and startup pragmatism. You will set the strategy, own the outcomes, and serve as the internal expert, while identifying, contracting, and managing high-quality external partners: accountants, attorneys, payroll providers, auditors, insurance brokers, and state compliance vendors. You are comfortable in a high-ownership, high-ambiguity role, and excited by the opportunity to define an organization’s operating system from scratch. We are open to this role being structured as a full-time employee or a senior fractional/contract engagement for the right candidate.You Will:Establish high-caliber financial systems and reporting: Build and manage grant tracking, reporting calendars, and spend-down requirements across all transferred and new grants; own year-end audit, Form 990, budgeting, and board-level financial reporting.Run analyses to drive strategic organizational decisions: Build financial models, scenario plans, and organizational forecasts to support strategic decision-making in a fast-scaling environment.Drive organizational spinout and setup: Own financial, legal, and compliance workstreams to stand up the AI Access Initiative as an independent 501(c)(3), including entity creation, payroll, benefits, and staff transfers.Design, procure, and oversee a lean, high-performing finance and compliance ecosystem: Manage outsourced partners (e.g., accounting, audit, legal, payroll, insurance, and HR) while ensuring strong institutional controls without unnecessary bureaucracy.Enable our expansion: Design financial systems capable of supporting rapid international scaling and increasingly complex funding structures.Drive high-leverage resource allocation: Partner with leadership to build a culture of analytically rigorous budget allocation and organizational decision-making.Build and own compliance infrastructure: Own critical compliance and institutional risk infrastructure, including charitable registration, insurance, governance, and regulatory filings.Support governance and board operations: Establish board meeting cadence, minute-keeping, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and fiduciary orientation for new members.Manage legal affairs & contracting: Serve as the primary internal point of contact for all legal matters; review and negotiate vendor contracts, grant agreements, MOUs, and partnership arrangements, while ensuring IP protections are in place for open-source assets.RequirementsThe ideal candidate is a finance and operations leader with a track record of standing up or significantly scaling organizational infrastructure. You are excited by the challenge of helping a new organization scale responsibly under conditions of rapid growth, evolving strategy, and funding uncertainty. We seek someone with high throughput, strong judgment, and the ability to manage complexity across multiple workstreams simultaneously.You will likely have:8+ years in finance, strategic operations, consulting, nonprofit leadership, startup operations, or related fields, including significant experience managing organizational finance and budgeting.Experience sourcing and managing outside counsel, accounting firms, auditors, insurance brokers, and payroll providers — you know how to get the most out of external partners.Comfort operating at both strategic and operational levels: you can set policy and also handle the detail work required to ensure nothing slips.Strong written communication skills; able to translate complex financial and legal concepts clearly for board members, program staff, and funders.CPA, JD, or equivalent professional credential strongly preferred; nonprofit-specific training or certification (e.g., CGAP, CNAP) a plus.Experience with nonprofit finance, compliance, and 501(c)(3) environments strongly preferred: e.g., Form 990, single audit, charitable solicitation registration, IRS rebuttable presumption, and state-level tax exemptions.TraitsHigh ownership mindset: you hold yourself accountable for outcomes, not just tasks, and you proactively surface and resolve problems before they escalate.Comfortable with ambiguity and early-stage environments; you can build structure from scratch without waiting to be told exactly how.Collaborative and low-ego; you work well with a small, fast-moving leadership team and can flex between big-picture strategy and detailed execution.Mission-aligned: you are motivated by the opportunity to ensure that the legal and financial infrastructure of this organization is a platform for impact, not a bottleneck.Position LocationThis role location is flexible anywhere within the United States for fully remote candidatesWe are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of a U.S. employment visa at this time. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. for roles based in the U.S.Evidence Action is an Equal Opportunity Employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.BenefitsThe expected role range for this US position is listed below. We consider multiple factors when determining the base salary for a role, including but not limited to: role scope, program budgets, internal equity, and a candidate's qualifications and/or prior experience.Note: Pay and benefits will be commensurate with the role specifications, local statutory requirements, and the cost of labor in the markets where we operate.The pay range for this role is $155,000 - $170,000 per year.This role will initially be housed at Evidence Action, with the explicit plan to transfer with the AI Access Initiative as a founding member of the team when that project is spun out as a new entity later this year. At that point, benefits and policies may change. For US based roles, Evidence Action provides comprehensive benefits including international health care, HSA/FSA options, life insurance, disability coverage, retirement plans with a matching component, generous and flexible leave options, as well as other employee perks on a reimbursement basis. For more information visit our careers page or ask our recruiting team!
About The AI Access Initiative
We're at an inflection point in artificial intelligence – presenting both tremendous potential opportunity and risk for people in developing countries: rather than allowing the poverty gap to expand, low-income countries have an opportunity to leapfrog development milestones with AI-powered innovations. Incubated at Evidence Action, we’re launching The AI Access Initiative, an organization focused on scaling AI-enabled ‘big bets’ to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of people in poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
We will operate at the intersection of global development actors, top AI labs, and leading researchers to drive meaningful access to the benefits of AI for the 3.5 billion people living in poverty globally. We will create “public good,” open-sourced playbooks, toolkits, and insights that define how to design and launch tractable and impactful AI-enabled programs. Given the scale of opportunity, we expect our portfolio to expand substantially, but to start, we’re scaling two programs focused on AI in Agriculture and AI in Health.
We are led by former Evidence Action CEO Kanika Bahl, a founding member of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, and advised by Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; and Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs for Alphabet and Google. This work builds on Evidence Action’s track record reaching 530M+ people with cost-effective, evidence-based programs across 9 countries in Africa and Asia, with a focus on last-mile delivery.
Our approach
We’re scaling AI-enabled big bets to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of individuals living in poverty. We will focus both on delivering near-term, tractable direct impact and supporting governments to establish an enabling environment for the ‘AI for Good’ ecosystem, including:
- Launching AI-enabled interventions to impact tens or hundreds of millions, such as delivering AI-enabled forecasts to smallholder farmers to improve yields and earnings, leveraging AI to dramatically improve medical diagnosis and treatment, implementing frontier systems to identify and mitigate disease outbreaks, or putting personalized AI tutors into the hands of students to drive reductions to system-level educational attainment gaps. As part of this work, we will create “public good,” open-sourced playbooks, toolkits, and insights that define how to design and launch tractable and impactful AI-enabled programs. When relevant, we will partner with leading AI labs to shape technical offerings, including adapting for underrepresented languages, bandwidth constraints, etc.
- Partnering with governments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to drive regulatory changes, policy, and investments necessary to unlock beneficial use cases at national scale, while proactively mitigating the downside risks of AI.
Building on our recent analysis of near and medium-term AI opportunities in LMICs, we are advancing the highest-scoring interventions through a rigorous vetting process, including evidence reviews, cost-effectiveness analyses, risk assessments, and early operational/technical scoping. We are excited about the opportunity to deliver, and are now running deeper analysis on opportunities in global health.
The Role
We are seeking a high-ownership and rigorous finance and operations leader to help architect the institutional backbone of a rapidly scaling AI-focused global development organization. This founding role will partner closely with the CEO and leadership team on financial strategy, organizational scaling, and operational infrastructure. While incubated at Evidence Action, we plan to spin out in Q4 '26.
The right person thrives at the intersection of institutional rigor and startup pragmatism. You will set the strategy, own the outcomes, and serve as the internal expert, while identifying, contracting, and managing high-quality external partners: accountants, attorneys, payroll providers, auditors, insurance brokers, and state compliance vendors. You are comfortable in a high-ownership, high-ambiguity role, and excited by the opportunity to define an organization’s operating system from scratch.
We are open to this role being structured as a full-time employee or a senior fractional/contract engagement for the right candidate.
You Will:
- Establish high-caliber financial systems and reporting: Build and manage grant tracking, reporting calendars, and spend-down requirements across all transferred and new grants; own year-end audit, Form 990, budgeting, and board-level financial reporting.
- Run analyses to drive strategic organizational decisions: Build financial models, scenario plans, and organizational forecasts to support strategic decision-making in a fast-scaling environment.
- Drive organizational spinout and setup: Own financial, legal, and compliance workstreams to stand up the AI Access Initiative as an independent 501(c)(3), including entity creation, payroll, benefits, and staff transfers.
- Design, procure, and oversee a lean, high-performing finance and compliance ecosystem: Manage outsourced partners (e.g., accounting, audit, legal, payroll, insurance, and HR) while ensuring strong institutional controls without unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Enable our expansion: Design financial systems capable of supporting rapid international scaling and increasingly complex funding structures.
- Drive high-leverage resource allocation: Partner with leadership to build a culture of analytically rigorous budget allocation and organizational decision-making.
- Build and own compliance infrastructure: Own critical compliance and institutional risk infrastructure, including charitable registration, insurance, governance, and regulatory filings.
- Support governance and board operations: Establish board meeting cadence, minute-keeping, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and fiduciary orientation for new members.
- Manage legal affairs & contracting: Serve as the primary internal point of contact for all legal matters; review and negotiate vendor contracts, grant agreements, MOUs, and partnership arrangements, while ensuring IP protections are in place for open-source assets.
Requirements
The ideal candidate is a finance and operations leader with a track record of standing up or significantly scaling organizational infrastructure. You are excited by the challenge of helping a new organization scale responsibly under conditions of rapid growth, evolving strategy, and funding uncertainty. We seek someone with high throughput, strong judgment, and the ability to manage complexity across multiple workstreams simultaneously.
You will likely have:
- 8+ years in finance, strategic operations, consulting, nonprofit leadership, startup operations, or related fields, including significant experience managing organizational finance and budgeting.
- Experience sourcing and managing outside counsel, accounting firms, auditors, insurance brokers, and payroll providers — you know how to get the most out of external partners.
- Comfort operating at both strategic and operational levels: you can set policy and also handle the detail work required to ensure nothing slips.
- Strong written communication skills; able to translate complex financial and legal concepts clearly for board members, program staff, and funders.
- CPA, JD, or equivalent professional credential strongly preferred; nonprofit-specific training or certification (e.g., CGAP, CNAP) a plus.
- Experience with nonprofit finance, compliance, and 501(c)(3) environments strongly preferred: e.g., Form 990, single audit, charitable solicitation registration, IRS rebuttable presumption, and state-level tax exemptions.
Traits
- High ownership mindset: you hold yourself accountable for outcomes, not just tasks, and you proactively surface and resolve problems before they escalate.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and early-stage environments; you can build structure from scratch without waiting to be told exactly how.
- Collaborative and low-ego; you work well with a small, fast-moving leadership team and can flex between big-picture strategy and detailed execution.
- Mission-aligned: you are motivated by the opportunity to ensure that the legal and financial infrastructure of this organization is a platform for impact, not a bottleneck.
Position Location
This role location is flexible anywhere within the United States for fully remote candidates
We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of a U.S. employment visa at this time. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. for roles based in the U.S.
Evidence Action is an Equal Opportunity Employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.
Benefits
The expected role range for this US position is listed below. We consider multiple factors when determining the base salary for a role, including but not limited to: role scope, program budgets, internal equity, and a candidate's qualifications and/or prior experience.
Note: Pay and benefits will be commensurate with the role specifications, local statutory requirements, and the cost of labor in the markets where we operate.
The pay range for this role is $155,000 - $170,000 per year.
This role will initially be housed at Evidence Action, with the explicit plan to transfer with the AI Access Initiative as a founding member of the team when that project is spun out as a new entity later this year. At that point, benefits and policies may change. For US based roles, Evidence Action provides comprehensive benefits including international health care, HSA/FSA options, life insurance, disability coverage, retirement plans with a matching component, generous and flexible leave options, as well as other employee perks on a reimbursement basis. For more information visit our careers page or ask our recruiting team!
We do development differently.Evidence Action is a global nonprofit organization with an approach distinctive in international development – we exclusively scale interventions that are backed by strong evidence and can be delivered with exceptional cost-effectiveness. We take a data-driven approach to identifying and scaling interventions which deliver outsized impact for the hundreds of millions of impoverished individuals who are our clients. We deploy deep expertise in building for scale, coupled with a focus on rigorous measurement and continuous program improvement, to ensure these solutions measurably improve the lives of millions. We deliver tremendous impact.Our programs – in health, nutrition, and safe water – have grown since our founding in 2013 to reach over 280 million people annually. Our Deworm the World Initiative has helped governments across Asia and Africa deliver over 1.3 billion childhood deworming treatments – which have been shown to increase long-term income by 13%. This places deworming among the most cost-effective income generation programs in the world, as ranked by charity evaluators such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save. Our Dispensers for Safe Water program provides sustained safe water access to over 4 million people in rural Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi. Our last-mile delivery network services communities through a free-to-use, human-centric design that increases usage over 5 times that of traditional water treatment options, preventing childhood illness and deaths caused by unsafe water. Dispensers for Safe Water has been recognized by Charity Navigator for its high cost-effectiveness, by Expo2020 as one of only 25 Global Best Practice Programmes, and a chlorine dispenser now resides in the Nobel Museum, selected by 2019 Nobel laureate Michael Kremer – whose work was integral to the program’s development. We drive innovation.Evidence Action’s Accelerator builds the next generation of exceptional programs, taking an approach most similar to a venture capital model. We thoughtfully advance promising new programs through a rigorous, 6 stage process – from desk research to testing at large scale. We are ruthless in exiting programs which do not meet our criteria on scalability, evidence of impact, and cost-effectiveness, ensuring that the programs that do advance deliver outsized impact for millions of people. We are global.Over 400 individuals work on our programs across eight countries – Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, India, and the United States, including both Evidence Action staff and close partners. We are united by a tremendous passion for our mission and the impact that together we create. We are strong because of our diversity of experience, geography, and background – with over 90% of our people in the countries where our impact is focused. This spirit, and our culture, are guided by a set of core values that underpin our work. These values embody our focus on evidence, urgency, iteration, and incessance in our search for solutions. We have big ambitions.Our goal is to double our impact by 2024, to fulfill our vision of a world where hundreds of millions of people in the poorest places have better opportunities and their lives are measurably improved. We believe in bold and urgent action – because poverty doesn’t wait, and neither should we. We need great people.Our success to date is due to the collective work of our amazing staff. To achieve our ambitious goals, we need to grow our team. We are looking for people who share our passion for following the evidence, seeking cost-effective ways of working, and operating at scale. We seek individuals who take an entrepreneurial approach, enjoy tackling hard problems, and iterate to achieve the best solutions – and know that people with these skills come from many professional backgrounds. If our vision and approach excite you as much as it does us, we invite you to join us.
We do development differently.
Evidence Action is a global nonprofit organization with an approach distinctive in international development – we exclusively scale interventions that are backed by strong evidence and can be delivered with exceptional cost-effectiveness. We take a data-driven approach to identifying and scaling interventions which deliver outsized impact for the hundreds of millions of impoverished individuals who are our clients. We deploy deep expertise in building for scale, coupled with a focus on rigorous measurement and continuous program improvement, to ensure these solutions measurably improve the lives of millions.
We deliver tremendous impact.
Our programs – in health, nutrition, and safe water – have grown since our founding in 2013 to reach over 280 million people annually. Our Deworm the World Initiative has helped governments across Asia and Africa deliver over 1.3 billion childhood deworming treatments – which have been shown to increase long-term income by 13%. This places deworming among the most cost-effective income generation programs in the world, as ranked by charity evaluators such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save. Our Dispensers for Safe Water program provides sustained safe water access to over 4 million people in rural Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi. Our last-mile delivery network services communities through a free-to-use, human-centric design that increases usage over 5 times that of traditional water treatment options, preventing childhood illness and deaths caused by unsafe water. Dispensers for Safe Water has been recognized by Charity Navigator for its high cost-effectiveness, by Expo2020 as one of only 25 Global Best Practice Programmes, and a chlorine dispenser now resides in the Nobel Museum, selected by 2019 Nobel laureate Michael Kremer – whose work was integral to the program’s development.
We drive innovation.
Evidence Action’s Accelerator builds the next generation of exceptional programs, taking an approach most similar to a venture capital model. We thoughtfully advance promising new programs through a rigorous, 6 stage process – from desk research to testing at large scale. We are ruthless in exiting programs which do not meet our criteria on scalability, evidence of impact, and cost-effectiveness, ensuring that the programs that do advance deliver outsized impact for millions of people.
We are global.
Over 400 individuals work on our programs across eight countries – Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, India, and the United States, including both Evidence Action staff and close partners. We are united by a tremendous passion for our mission and the impact that together we create. We are strong because of our diversity of experience, geography, and background – with over 90% of our people in the countries where our impact is focused. This spirit, and our culture, are guided by a set of core values that underpin our work. These values embody our focus on evidence, urgency, iteration, and incessance in our search for solutions.
We have big ambitions.
Our goal is to double our impact by 2024, to fulfill our vision of a world where hundreds of millions of people in the poorest places have better opportunities and their lives are measurably improved. We believe in bold and urgent action – because poverty doesn’t wait, and neither should we.
We need great people.
Our success to date is due to the collective work of our amazing staff. To achieve our ambitious goals, we need to grow our team. We are looking for people who share our passion for following the evidence, seeking cost-effective ways of working, and operating at scale. We seek individuals who take an entrepreneurial approach, enjoy tackling hard problems, and iterate to achieve the best solutions – and know that people with these skills come from many professional backgrounds.
If our vision and approach excite you as much as it does us, we invite you to join us.
