Technical Program Manager, Emergency Cash at GiveDirectly

What you’ll do:

Lead Technical Program Delivery for Emergency Responses

• Embed (remotely or on-site) with the emergency response team during activations to manage end-to-end technical program delivery - leading scoping, requirements gathering, system configuration and implementation, QA and testing, troubleshooting, and closeout.
• Collaborate with Product, Research, Engineering, Data, Payments, and Operations teams to ensure systems are aligned with programmatic objectives and work seamlessly in field conditions.
• Ensure all systems comply with GD’s standards for data protection, privacy, and financial controls.
• Manage technical training and onboarding for surge staff, collaborators, and local partners.

Strengthen Rapid Response Technical Readiness

• Maintain and improve technical documentation, deployment guides, and incident-response protocols to ensure consistency and speed in future responses.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to develop product roadmaps and requirements, and prioritize and implement improvements that enhance emergency response scalability and reliability.
• Track and report on technical readiness metrics (e.g. uptime, deployment speed, integration failures, data quality, testing coverage).
• Lead and document technical design and implementation retrospectives, lessons learned and root cause analyses after each response to drive continuous improvement and contribute to product development strategies.
• Support technical assessments, evaluations, testing and adoption of new products and solutions that strengthen emergency response technical capabilities.

Drive Safety, Risk Management, and Systems Resilience

• Support risk assessments for systems and data flows in high-risk operating environments.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks - including connectivity, data loss, device theft, fraud, system misuse - before and during activations.
• Contribute to incident reviews to improve our safety and resilience protocols.

What you’ll bring:

Values & core competencies

• Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.

Professional experience

• 5+ years of professional experience; we welcome a wide range of relevant backgrounds (e.g. technical program management, product management, data analytics, software engineering, international development, emergency response, or management consulting).
• Experience managing timelines, operational risk, stakeholders, and complex deliverables across multiple workstreams.
• Proven ability to operate in fast-paced and ambiguous settings, exercising sound judgment to balance speed, risk, and quality.

Technical skills

• Experience owning technical decisions when no predefined playbook exists, including evaluating novel technologies, system designs, and risks.
• Working proficiency with a programming or statistical language (e.g. Python, R, Matlab, Java, Apex) - this role involves building automation and business logic, but it is not an engineering or data science role.
• High attention to detail and strong instincts for analysis and validating data and code creatively and rigorously.
• Structured approach to problem-solving and a drive to uncover and fix root causes rather than surface-level issues.
• Ability to clearly communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders across varied cultural, national, and social backgrounds.
• Fluency in English. 
• Preferred, not required: Experience working with relational databases (e.g. SQL).
• Preferred, not required: Experience with data visualization.

Contextual understanding

• Understanding, or interest in learning, how technology enables emergency response operations (e.g. CVA platforms, identity verification, data collection tools, payment systems, mobile apps).
• Preferred, not required: Experience working in humanitarian or emergency response contexts.
• Preferred, not required: Familiarity with humanitarian coordination systems (UN clusters, INGO networks) and donor expectations.