This role was posted on April 3, 2026. Please note that we will review applications on a rolling basis.
The Role
At Last Mile Health (LMH), we make bold commitments that inspire innovation. Do you have the technical credibility and strategic vision to lead government-owned, AI-enabled digital health systems that work for last mile communities? If so, you may be our next Director, Digital Health & Informatics.
We believe that community health workers are the backbone of primary healthcare in the world's most remote communities and that the right digital tools, built responsibly and in genuine partnership with governments, can transform what they're able to do. We partner with Ministries of Health across Africa to strengthen national platforms, digital workforce tools, and data systems that support community health workers at scale.
The Director, Digital Health & Informatics will lead LMH's Global Digital Health practice as part of the Health System Strengthening (HSS) team. This role exists to serve and strengthen LMH's country teams—providing the technical vision, tools, and expertise they need to support Ministries of Health in designing and scaling digital health systems that work for last mile communities.
The Director provides strategic leadership for LMH’s Global Digital Health practice, setting technical direction, stewarding the AI agenda, and ensuring the practice delivers real value for community health workers. This is a practice building role: the Director works through LMH’s global engineering team and country digital health teams rather than operating as a hands-on architect. Technical credibility is essential for this person to earn the trust of the Ministry engineering team, direct a small in-house engineering team, and hold partners accountable. Ideal candidate would be someone who is a strategic leader, not an individual contributor.
The Director partners closely with the Chief Technical Officer (CTO), the Global Monitoring, Evaluation, Research & Learning (MERL) team, Program teams, and in-country digital health leads to develop responsible data and technology policies, drive fundraising and business development, and build the global evidence base for digital health interventions. This role will also cultivate genuine peer relationships with counterparts in donor and norming organizations to build partnerships and accelerate shared learning.
This is a 24-month fixed-term contract with potential for renewal.
This role is based in Nairobi and is open to Kenyan nationals or citizens of East African Community (EAC) member states who are currently based in Nairobi, as relocation expenses will not be covered for this role. The position will start as fully remote with a potential shift toward a hybrid or co-working environment in the future.
What you’ll do
Portfolio Oversight, Management, and Strategy
- Set and maintain the strategic vision for LMH's Global Digital Health practice, ensuring it remains aligned with country program priorities and organizational goals.
- Lead LMH's innovation portfolio (Future Fit Initiative), digital and AI portfolio — identifying high-leverage investments across country programs, setting criteria for scalability, government ownership, and sustainability, supporting countries to design strong prototypes, and guiding the transition from pilot innovations to government-owned systems while balancing innovation with feasibility and risk
- Oversee the practice's operational plan, workplan, and budget management, working in close collaboration with the Manager, Digital Health.
- Foster team cohesion and oversee project management and knowledge management systems across the digital health team
- Lead cross-functional collaboration across LMH global teams, ensuring digital health efforts are well-coordinated and mutually reinforcing
- Partner with the CTO and Managing Director of Global MERL to design, improve, and evaluate digital health interventions.
- Contribute to the development of organizational policies and best practices related to responsible technology use and data governance.
Government, Stakeholder Collaboration, and Technical Assistance
- Serve country teams as a senior technical resource for engaging Ministries of Health on national digital health strategy, deployment, and governance
- Support and strengthen in-country digital health teams in their work with Ministries of Health to develop, refine, and execute visions for nationwide digital health deployments, with a focus on digital information systems, performance management, and sustainable learning solutions for community health workers.
- Provide surge technical assistance to country program teams as requested, including support for deployment procedures, sustainable financing plans, and governance structures.
- Drive continuous improvement of digital health interventions by synthesizing feedback from end-users, country teams, governments, and technical experts.
- Oversee the full software product cycle for country-facing tools, including technical requirements, engineering contracts, code development, and quality assurance.
- Champion public good digital solutions—ensuring software modifications are documented in appropriate repositories and maintained as open-source where applicable.
- Champion government ownership as the end state for all digital health interventions ensuring LMH’s role is to build Ministry capacity and confidence, not dependency on partners.
Partnerships and Advocacy:
- Represent LMH's digital health practice externally, advocating for higher quality, greater scale, and stronger government ownership of digital health tools for community health workers.
- Develop and steward partnerships with key digital health actors including hardware providers, software development firms, academic institutions, and peer organizations.
- Lead business development efforts for the digital health practice, including identifying funding opportunities, designing projects in response to funding calls, and contributing technical writing and budgeting for proposals.
- Support monitoring, operational research, and learning initiatives to document best practices and build the global evidence base for LMH's digital health approach.
- Communicate LMH's digital health work through blogs, peer-reviewed publications, and representation at global digital health conferences.
Technical support and Capacity Building (internal):
- Work with the existing Digital Health team to support country and global teams in product cycle management of digital health technologies.
- Develop and maintain the department's digital health strategy, standard operating procedures, and roadmaps, including LMH's internal Data Portal.
- Build the technical capacity of LMH staff, promoting continuous learning and adoption of relevant technologies, including AI.
- Provide expert guidance on digital health technologies, AI/machine learning, data security, and system integration to internal and external audiences with varying levels of technical experience.
- Strengthen digital health organizational structures across country programs and support recruitment of digital health team members as needed.
What You'll Bring
- Extensive experience in digital health and/or international development, with a track record of managing applied technology projects and providing strategic direction. You have built and shipped digital health tools in the field, not just advised on them.
- Management experience working in low and middle-income countries, with a background in community health preferred.
- Experience engaging government policymakers on digital health strategy, deployment, and governance, with LMIC government experience strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated experience deploying and delivering national digital health systems in LMICs (e.g. DHIS2, CommCare, ODK).
- Strong understanding of the ICT4D landscape and best practices, specifically in digital health and the application of technology in remote, low-resource environments.
- Experience applying or overseeing AI and machine learning tools in a digital health or development context.
- Strong data literacy—you can engage fluently with data engineers and analysts, interpret complex outputs, and hold your own on questions of data quality, systems architecture, and pipeline design. Hands on experience with SQL, Python, and data visualization tools (e.g. Superset, Tableau, DHIS2) is a strong plus.
- Agile project management experience for software development, including CI/CD and DevOps approaches.
- Ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences across government, donor, and community health contexts
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity. You make good decisions with incomplete information, keep teams moving when direction is unclear, and know when to pause and recalibrate.
- Strong change management skills particularly in government partnership contexts where pace is externally established and sustained adoption matters more than launch
- Track record of building and mentoring distributed, multi-country teams. You invest in people as much as systems, and the teams you’ve led have grown in capability and confidence.
You’ll Impress Us If
- You have experience managing cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP).
- You’re familiar with healthcare interoperability standards (FHIR, HL7).
- You have experience with data and knowledge management systems.
- You have cloud certification (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- You have published work in digital health, including peer-reviewed journals or widely-cited technical publications.
- You have excellent technical writing skills, including the ability to produce high-quality grant proposals and technical requirements for third-party developers.
- You have experience with voice-first or low bandwidth AI applications particularly LLM based tools deployed in multilingual low connectivity environments.
- You’re actively engaged with the global digital health community.
Compensation Information
At Last Mile Health, we strive to reward our employees equitably and transparently. This means that we pay our employees based on a clear and consistent methodology and without regard to their identity or personal relationships. We have made this model fully transparent so that everyone has access to all information related to compensation. We hope this helps you better understand Last Mile Health’s values and commitments to our employees. We look forward to answering any questions you may have during the hiring process.
Before applying to this role, please take a moment to learn more about our approach to compensation and how compensation works in each of the countries where we operate. Please find the link to our compensation model below:
OVERVIEW OF LAST MILE HEALTH’S COMPENSATION MODEL
Compensation for this position:
The Band for this position: SLB-5
The base salary range for this position is $90,966 - $118,531 USD per annum (payable in Kenyan Shillings), depending on experience doing an equivalent role. Please note that this compensation is subject to statutory taxes.
As we expand into the Kenyan market, we are in the process of developing our full country compensation overview. In the meantime, please refer to the salary scale found on page 19 of the compensation model overview. Positions falling within our Senior Leadership Bands (SLB) at Last Mile Health are paid on a single set of bands regardless of location. Last Mile Health offers a generous benefits package to all employees, including comprehensive medical insurance, life insurance, paid time off, retirement, and a host of supplemental benefits. Please refer to page 21 in our compensation model overview to learn more about our offerings. These benefits vary across geography according to market expectations and local labor laws and our team is happy to discuss any questions you may have throughout the hiring process.
About Last Mile Health
Last Mile Health partners with governments to design, scale, strengthen, and sustain high-quality community health systems, which empower teams of community and frontline health workers to bring life-saving primary healthcare to the world’s most remote communities. LMH is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization. For more information, visit www.lastmilehealth.org.
We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity at LMH. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.