Head of Product - Wadhwani AI

Wadhwani AI Global (WAIG) is a non-profit AI research and product organisation building AI for social impact across the Global South, outside India. We work with governments, multilateral institutions, foundations, and on-the-ground partners to deploy AI solutions in agriculture, health, and education at population scale. With deepening operations in Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and across the African continent, we are entering a new phase of growth — building product capability that matches the scale and ambition of our partnerships.

Role Overview

The Head of Product will lead products across the organisation. This is a senior leadership role responsible for the AI products WAIG builds, deploys, and scales across health, education, agriculture, and other social impact verticals. This role owns the product function end-to-end and partners closely with leadership on strategy, delivery, and donor engagement.

Your Role

• Product Strategy & Vision

Define the product vision, roadmap, and priorities across health, education, and agriculture verticals

Translate WAIG's mission and donor commitments into a coherent multi-year product strategy

Make build-vs-partner-vs-consume decisions for AI capabilities across the portfolio

Drive product positioning in donor conversations, government engagements, and partner discussions

• Delivery & Execution

Own end-to-end delivery of AI products from concept through deployment and scale

Set and enforce product standards: discovery rigour, technical specs, evaluation criteria, deployment quality

Run a disciplined product lifecycle: hypothesis → MVP → field evaluation → iteration → scale

Ensure timely, high-quality delivery against grant commitments and donor milestones

• Team Leadership

Build and lead the product organisation — recruit, mentor, and grow product talent across geographies

Foster a strong product culture: user-obsessed, evidence-driven, technically rigorous

Partner closely with the Technology team on engineering capacity, infrastructure, and ML delivery

• External Engagement

Represent WAIG's product capability in conversations with governments (Ministry of ICT Rwanda, Smart Africa, ministries of health and education across Africa), multilateral institutions (UNICEF, UNDP, World Bank), and donors (Gates Foundation, others)

Lead product portions of major proposals and donor pitches; contribute to fundraising in partnership with the Growth lead

Build relationships with peer organisations, research labs, and AI-for-good ecosystems

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

Partner with senior leadership on overall organisational strategy and delivery commitments

Work with the Growth and Fundraising lead on pipeline shaping and proposal development

Support the broader leadership team in operationalising the WAIG strategy

What We Are Looking For

15+ years of experience in AI product management

Track record of building and shipping AI/ML products at scale — in real-world deployment

contexts, not pure consumer or pure research

Direct experience working with governments on technology deployments

Experience working with or in Africa, the Global South, or comparable contexts strongly preferred

Capability

Strong technical depth — able to engage credibly with ML engineers, evaluate technical trade-offs, and shape solution architecture

Outstanding strategic and structured thinking — able to set priorities, kill the wrong projects, and drive focus

Excellent communicator — equally comfortable in a Minister's office, a donor pitch, a field site, and a code review

Strong people leader — has built and grown product teams in distributed, multi-geography settings

Disposition

Mission-aligned — genuinely motivated by AI for social impact, not just by the title or the geography

Comfortable with ambiguity, frequent travel, and the realities of working in emerging-market deployment contexts

High ownership; low ego; bias to action