Senior Engagement Lead

Type : Full-time contractor (hours negotiable)

Location : Remote, Africa time-zone required (preference for Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Rwanda, or Ethiopia)

OpenFn is an open-source digital public good and a key building block for next generation digital public infrastructure. Government digital transformation teams use it to safely connect web apps, AI tools, registries, and legacy systems to automate the delivery of public services in a secure, stable, scalable way. In an age of AI-driven atrophy, OpenFn builds government muscle and increases country’s agency to chart their own digital futures.

Our team, Open Function Group , is the primary steward of this software platform. We are a team of IT and data integration specialists that provide the software, training, and technical support to help partners in 40+ countries automate mission-critical workflows.

We’re a fully-remote team that uses cutting edge technologies to drive efficiency where it matters most. We believe that too much brainpower is spent making marginal improvements to already comfortable lives, and are committed instead to helping the global majority expand their own horizons through technological empowerment.

We are seeking an experienced Senior Engagement Lead to work directly with our government counterparts, in-country implementing partners, fellow DPGs for DPI, and multilateral development banks to identify, qualify, and help architect powerful, national-scale projects that impact millions of lives and empower countries to succeed in their digital transformation initiatives on their own terms. In this role, you will sell and then run end-to-end implementations.

This role uniquely combines strategic partnership development with hands-on engagement leadership. You’ll spend roughly half your time identifying and shaping new opportunities across the DPI ecosystem, and the other half running complex implementation projects—owning client relationships and ensuring engagements deliver high-quality outcomes on scope, budget, and timeline.

A workflow / AI orchestration platform is an essential component of national-scale DPI (see : CDPI’s DPI-AI Framework ; DPI in the AI Era ) yet in 2025 many implementations took costly shortcuts, either hard-coding brittle, unmaintainable point-to-point integrations or leaving new investments isolated from key country systems.

Your role is to prevent this. You’ll be working hand-in-hand with our CEO to ensure that new DPG for DPI implementations employ a workflow / AI orchestration layer, and you’ll own these engagements from initial opportunity through successful delivery via our implementation team or partner implementers.

What You’ll Be Doing, Day-to-Day

Strategic Partnership & Opportunity Development (60%)

• Manage key relationships across the DPI ecosystem, mapping out upcoming country needs (governments), DPI implementations (local SIs and DPGs), and funding priorities (MDBs) to identify critical workflow / AI orchestration platform requirements
• Identify and qualify new national-scale projects where workflow / AI orchestration is essential
• Connect partners to appropriate technology providers (inside and outside of Open Function Group) to ensure their DPG4DPI needs are met
• Shape opportunities by helping architect solutions and positioning OpenFn’s capabilities
• Interact closely with leaders on our core product and services teams to align on feature roadmap decisions and country service & support initiatives
• Represent OpenFn at industry events, on working groups, and in stakeholder meetings

Engagement Leadership & Project Delivery (40%)

While this is not a software engineering role, the nature of these large, complex, digital public infrastructure projects and the diversity of the stakeholders involved means that you’ll be required to communicate clearly about both policy-level issues (e.g., how ID, payments, or data exchange systems impact welfare in developing countries) and technical issues (e.g., the difference between securely exposing an API with X-Road, and automating a public service that calls that API with OpenFn).

Your success will be measured by the number of new DPI projects you’re able to develop and deliver successfully.

Requirements

Desired Qualifications

Things that might set you apart

Benefits

To apply, write a very good cover letter. It doesn't need to be long. But it's got to be so good, in fact, that it stands out from all the “perfect” AI slop and gives us a small glimpse (a very small one, for you are not your cover letter) of how wonderful the real you is.