Freelance Senior Technical Advisor

Role Details Level: Senior/ Lead Start Date: ASAP Duration: 6 months Day Rate: Dependent on experience Weekly hours: 3-4 days/ week Location: Remote Europe, GMT/BST or CET friendly Language: English, plus Spanish and/or Portuguese   In this role, you’ll be a senior technical advisor to city governments across North, Central and South America, working in both an advisory and a hands-on capacity to help them design, build and launch small scale pilots of new services for residents. Working alongside experienced product managers, data scientists, AI engineers, and designers, you’ll help multidisciplinary city teams build in-house product development capability by prototyping and delivering digital products and services, many of which harness data and AI. You won’t own the decisions, but you’ll shape them. You’ll guide cities through the full product development lifecycle, helping them weigh the strategic and technical trade-offs at each stage: how to design system and data architecture that’s right-sized for a pilot but built to scale, how to prototype and test possible solutions to validate assumptions, and when AI approaches such as machine learning or large language models are the right tool (and when they aren’t). You’ll roll up your sleeves to prototype and demonstrate what good looks like, while making sure your clients understand the reasoning well enough to own the outcome. This role suits someone with the technical depth of a tech lead, and the judgement, communication skills and patience to lead through influence rather than authority. You’ll need to work fluently in English and in at least one of Spanish or Portuguese.   Key skills and experiences - Extensive hands-on technical experience, with strong knowledge of system and data architecture, data pipelines, DevOps and infrastructure, and a track record of delivering and deploying robust solutions end to end, from prototype to pilot, across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, including legacy systems and resource-constrained ones, so that your recommendations are realistic and buildable. - Familiarity with AI and machine learning approaches, including large language models, and experience deploying them or working alongside ML engineers to integrate them into products, with enough understanding to judge when they’re the right tool and how to build them in responsibly. - Experience taking products from early concept to first release, while laying foundations for scale, with a track record of rapid prototyping and assumption testing and a “show, don’t tell” approach that uses working prototypes to build shared understanding and inform decisions. - Experience working in multidisciplinary teams, collaborating closely with product managers, designers and other disciplines throughout the product lifecycle. - The ability to explain technical ideas and trade-offs clearly to audiences of all technical levels, from engineers to non-technical stakeholders and senior decision-makers. - Experience setting technical direction for a project or small team and guiding other engineers, as a tech lead or senior engineer. - Experience influencing technical decisions you don't directly control, whether in a consulting or advisory role or as an in-house engineer working across teams and with senior stakeholders. - Curiosity and flexibility in problem solving, and comfort working through ambiguity and uncertainty in complex environments. - Professional working proficiency in English and in Spanish and/or Portuguese. Nice to have - Experience working with multicultural teams and on international projects. - Experience working with government or other public-sector organisations, or on services for residents and citizens. - Familiarity with responsible AI practices, such as data privacy, bias and fairness, transparency, and the governance considerations specific to public-sector use of AI. - Experience supporting organisations to build their own technical capability, for example through coaching, mentoring or setting up new teams and practices. Our hiring process We’ve kept the process short and focused. Here’s what to expect: 1. Application & Video As part of your application, we’ll ask you to record a short video (1–3 minutes, instructions below) describing a technical project — work or personal — that you really enjoyed working on. - Please record it in Spanish or Portuguese, whichever you speak fluently. - You don’t need to show your face — a voiceover on a screen share, or any other format you’re comfortable with, is fine. - We want to understand what the project was and why you enjoyed working on it. This isn’t a test of production quality; we’re interested in how you think and talk about your work. 2. Initial screening call A short conversation to cover the basics — your timezone, working languages, availability, and a chance for you to ask early questions about the role and how we work. 3. Technical interview (~60 minutes) A deeper conversation about your technical background and experience. We’ll talk through how you’ve approached real problems, the decisions you’ve made, and how you’d apply that thinking to the work at IF. 4. Ways of working interview (~45–60 minutes) A conversation about how you collaborate, communicate, and work with others — including how you operate in an advisory capacity with clients and teams. We’ll aim to keep you updated at every stage and let you know the outcome promptly after each step. How to record and submit your video The simplest way is Loom (free, no download needed): 1. Go to loom.com http://loom.com and create a free account. 2. Click New video → Record a video in your browser. Choose Screen and camera or Screen only if you’d prefer not to appear on camera, and make sure your microphone is selected. 3. Record your video — remember, 1 to 3 minutes is all we need. The free plan has a 5-minute limit, which is plenty. 4. When you stop recording, Loom will open the video and give you a link. Click Copy link. 5. Check the sharing setting is Anyone with the link can view. 6. Paste the link into the Link to your video field on the application form.