Build and advance digital public goods with us!
Here’s our vision for this growing team and where you can play a role in boosting tech for good
As we are boosting our work on Digital Public Goods, we are boosting the team! We are hiring new positions on our team focused on our partnership with the Digital Public Goods Alliance. Read on to learn about the vision for this growing team, and the opportunities that lie ahead.
Four years ago, UNICEF and the Government of Norway began incubating a concerted effort to promote digital public goods as a push to advance the Sustainable Development Goals. The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) was thus born as a multi-stakeholder initiative to facilitate the discovery, development, use, and investment in digital public goods. The DPGA is now endorsed by the UN Secretary-General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation.
The UNICEF Office of Innovation has been playing a key role in building the Digital Public Goods Alliance and preparing it for its next phase of growth. As co-host of the Secretariat, we support overall coordination of all activities. As a Board member, we guide the DPGA’s strategy and how it is implemented. We have also led on the development of the Alliance’s digital infrastructure. Let’s look at the Registry of Digital Public Goods, for example. Embracing UNICEF’s open-source approach to innovation, a workstream that started as a nimble landscaping effort of potential digital public goods, has now become one of the pillars of the work of the DPGA. We recently documented the architecture and design considerations from that journey. Today, the registry presents over 90 fully vetted DPGs, with a library of 550 more nominees. We are busy exploring how we can build new features that allow us to use the crowd to more efficiently vet solutions, visualise them and even use innovative methods to raise more resources for DPGs (watch this space for details!).
UNICEF’s engagement has also supported efforts across 10 pathfinder countries - from partnering with local entrepreneurs that are building the next generation of DPGs from emerging and developing markets, to accelerating DPGs in close partnership with governments, to providing tools that help with the deployment. We also directly support early stage digital public goods like Kindly and invest in them through our Venture Fund.
UNICEF has been making significant contributions to the Digital Public Goods Alliance with a fairly small team, and now we have the opportunity to grow our team and multiply the reach and impact of our work. We have a shared vision for a more equitable world through the adoption and adaptation of digital public goods around the globe - and are growing all of our work across these areas, using emerging tech to better support DPGs (think NFT auctions, quadratic funding and DAOs), channeling more investments to DPGs (because we know they can make a return), converting skeptics and opponents into allies and supporting more countries to deploy DPGs.
As you can see, we have an ambitious agenda, and we need all the help we can get. That is why we are excited to share the news that we are opening new full-time positions at the UNICEF Office of Innovation to join our awesome team and grow that awesomeness all around:
Tech Lead: This is a role for someone who has experience building open-source products, and taking them to a large number of users. We are looking for someone to build and lead the building of prototypes, who can be an expert guide to projects across the team, on overall tech stack, software development and open source practice. This role is for you if you’re willing to get your hands dirty writing and reviewing code, but also ready to share your experience of succeeding and failing with other entrepreneurs and product nerds who are building stuff to make the world better. We are looking for you to join our team and lead UNICEF's technical work and prototypes on digital public goods, providing support to new solutions, developing and socialising the latest technical standards and launching new stuff.
Read more and apply here.
Open Source Specialist: You are passionate about open source and know your way around the messiest of repos and the most opinionated communities. You want to bring your experience in building and supporting open source communities to the UN and help UNICEF Ventures improve its own open source practices across the portfolio of Fund investments and internal products. This is a role for someone who is connected to the open source world, has worked with or as part of product teams to design and grow open source solutions and is good at supporting and mentoring others in this area. Join us to step-up our engagement on open source, to expand our support to new solutions and turn skeptics into converts.
Read more and apply here.
For all the positions above, you are the ideal candidate if you are a strong, self-motivated individual with proven creative problem-solving skills, you are nimble and agile, you thrive working with a diverse interdisciplinary team, you are an open-source advocate, and you are kind ❤️
By joining our team, you will find a welcoming and flexible working environment. You will join a pleasure-to-work-with team of passionate individuals, and you will have a very inspiring and fulfilling job knowing that you are part of an organization that works for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. And we never give up.
UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.
