How you'll help us achieve it

We are seeking a Strategic People Partner who combines curiosity, strategic thinking, and hands-on HR delivery. This Partner will help us shape our people's experience, talent initiatives, and ultimately own an org/s as a trusted People Partner.

You’ll partner across teams to strengthen how we grow, support, and develop Wavers. Your work will touch key areas such as: performance coaching, development, talent management, organizational design and employee experience, while also supporting talent programs.

In this role, you'll;

• Support Organizational Design & Effectiveness

  • Partner with business leads to assess and evolve team structures that enable collaboration and effectiveness.
  • Facilitate organization health reviews, using people analytics to identify strengths, gaps, and growth opportunities.
  • Support managers on change management, team design, and culture alignment as their orgs scale.
  • Contribute to cross-functional projects that enhance employee experience, performance, and engagement.

  Learning & Development Collaborations

  • Partner with the L&D team and business leads to identify development needs and learning priorities across functions.
  • Support individual development planning and ensure learning insights are embedded into performance and career frameworks.
  • Track participation, to inform continuous improvement of learning initiatives.

  Talent Management & Growth

  • Partner with leaders to map career paths and growth frameworks across their teams.
  • Support performance review cycles, calibrations, and feedback conversations that drive meaningful development.
  • Build visibility into succession planning, and emerging talent across Wave.
  • Collaborate with the Talent team, to ensure a consistent strong pipeline of talent during hiring processes.

  Grow our Talent & Development Programs

  • Manage Wave’s internship and Support rotation programs: canvassing roles, coordinating interviews, onboarding, and successful integration.
  • Partner with leads to identify high-performing participants for continued development and full-time conversion opportunities.

  Strengthen Employer Branding 

  • Collaborate with Marketing and Comms to capture authentic stories that reflect Wave’s culture and employee experiences.
  • Contribute to content for social channels, events, and recruiting campaigns showcasing Wave as a great place to grow.

Key details

• Location: You'll work from our office in Abidjan and may travel to field locations.
• Work authorization in Côte d'Ivoire. 
• This is a permanent position.
• Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula. 
• We offer generous health insurance for yourself and your dependents.
• We support working parents - we offer 26 weeks of parental leave for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers, in addition to subsidized child care when they return to work.
• Airtime reimbursement.
• Free food and a beautiful office space.

Requirements

• 5-8 years of experience in Recruiting, Learning & Development, Talent management, or HRBP in a high-growth environment
• A degree in Business Administration, Human Resources, or equivalent.
• French and English proficiency. 
• Demonstrated background in talent and leadership management, as well as a proven ability to attract and retain outstanding talent and motivate high-performing teams.
• Hands-on operational experience in managing employee relations. 
• Ability to work with a variety of organizational leaders, to build consensus around HR strategy and tactics.
• Excellent negotiation and conflict resolution skills in dealing with sensitive employee issues and managing cultural differences.

You might be a good fit if you

• Are strategically minded but operationally hands-on. You can design frameworks and also execute them.
• Have strong coaching, facilitation, and communication skills, with a passion for helping others grow.
• Are analytical and data-informed, using insights to guide decisions and measure impact.
• Excel at building relationships and trust, partnering across multiple levels and cultures.
• Are curious, proactive, and adaptable; you thrive in a fast-moving, mission-driven environment.

About Sand

Sand Technologies is a global Physical AI company using data and AI to make critical industries work better. We partner with governments, cities and enterprises to improve how essential systems operate across healthcare, water, energy, telecommunications and infrastructure.

Our work delivers proven real-world impact. We have built AI systems that help manage London’s water supply, supported telecom network planning across hundreds of cities, and developed digital healthcare platforms serving tens of millions of people across Africa. From intelligent command centers to AI-powered infrastructure platforms, we help organizations sense, analyze and act in complex environments.

Our people are ambitious, curious and relentlessly practical. Our teams work alongside clients in the field, solving hard problems and deploying solutions that last. With colleagues across Africa, Europe, the UK and the US, we operate across the full stack - from research and engineering to deployment and capability building.

Our mission is simple: to harness AI to solve humanity’s most pressing challenges.

About the role

Sand is scaling rapidly across Africa, partnering with Ministries of Health to deploy the Health Operating System (HOS) — a decision-support and execution platform that transforms how health systems sense, analyze, and act on data. The HOS is already operational across multiple countries, with plans to expand to 15 countries by end of 2026, supported by 80+ Forward Deployed Engineers.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you are the technical spearhead of our client engagement in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unlike our roaming FDE roles, this is a permanently embedded position. You will be based full-time within the Ministry of Health in the DRC, becoming a long-term extension of the client's operational team. Your mandate is to build deep institutional relationships, develop comprehensive understanding of the national health system, and deliver sustained value over an extended engagement — not just rapid sprints, but lasting transformation.

This is not staff augmentation. You are an amalgamation of three roles:

1. The Software Engineer — Deep technical acumen to build and deploy production-grade solutions using Sand's product suite
2. The Product Manager — Strategic foresight to understand client problems, influence business objectives, and identify expansion opportunities
3. The Consultant — Client-facing finesse to navigate complex stakeholder relationships, manage scope, and transfer knowledge

Your primary mission is to prove our value fast, delivering functional solutions rapidly using Sand's products, playbooks, and tools, and then maturing those solutions into mission-critical infrastructure that the Ministry depends on daily. Over time, you become the institutional memory of the deployment — the person who understands the data landscape, the stakeholder dynamics, and the operational realities better than anyone.

Who We're Looking For

The Forward Deployed Engineer is a highly ambitious individual. You are someone who is deeply keen on learning — someone who dives in headfirst to solve some of the hardest, most complex problems in global health. You thrive on understanding the technology, understanding the stakeholders, understanding our product suite, and weaving all three together to deliver solutions that change how health systems operate.

This role is not for someone looking for comfort or routine. It is for someone who wants to step outside of their comfort zone, build something they can be proud of, and grow faster than they thought possible. The FDE programme is a career accelerator — an intensive rotation that exposes you to technical depth, strategic thinking, and client leadership in equal measure, all while working on problems that matter for millions of people.

For this permanently embedded role, you also need the maturity and resilience to sustain deep client relationships over months and years — not just weeks. You will become the face of Sand in Malawi, and that requires patience, cultural fluency, and the ability to navigate institutional complexity while maintaining momentum.

Key Responsibilities

Serve as Sand's Permanent Technical Presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

• Embed full-time within the Ministry of Health, becoming a trusted member of the client's extended team
• Develop deep, longitudinal understanding of the national health data landscape, institutional dynamics, and operational priorities
• Build and maintain relationships across all levels of the Ministry — from frontline data officers to senior leadership
• Act as the primary technical point of contact for all Sand activities in-country, coordinating with launchers, country directors, and visiting FDE teams

Drive On-Site Value Delivery

• Rapidly unlock, explore, and integrate client data sources (e.g., DHIS2, SCADA systems, network management platforms, operational databases)
• Understand client problems through prototyping and rapid value delivery — deploying POCs and MVPs using Sand's product components and playbooks
• Transition initial solutions into hardened, production-grade systems that the Ministry relies on daily
• Own the long-term health of deployed solutions — monitoring adoption, troubleshooting issues, and iterating based on user feedback
• Deliver and track value generated through deployment of Sand products

Enable Product-Led Growth

• Lead with Sand's existing product suite — know the products by heart and where each solution is most effective for the domain you're deployed in
• Document learnings, client challenges, and successful solutions as reusable patterns for the broader FDE community
• Drive discovery and expansion by uncovering new opportunities on the ground

Build Local Capacity and Sustainability

• Work alongside Ministry teams to co-create solutions and progressively transfer knowledge, ensuring they can operate and maintain systems independently
• Identify, recruit, and mentor local data engineers, scientists, and analysts to build sustainable in-country capacity
• Develop training materials and documentation tailored to the local context, language, and skill level
• Be the continuity that ensures handover isn't a cliff — you bridge the gap between Sand's deployment and the Ministry's long-term ownership

Feed the Platform Feedback Loop

• Channel field learnings back to improve the core product through structured mechanisms (Technical Deep Dives, Solution Swarms, pattern documentation)
• Turn "gravel roads" into "paved superhighways" — document solution patterns so the next FDE can move faster
• Contribute field feedback that influences 30% of the product roadmap

Requirements — Essential

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, data science, system deployment, or technical leadership
• Proficiency in at least one of: Python, SQL/PostgreSQL, JavaScript — with ability to write production-grade code
• Strong problem-solving skills with a bias toward action and rapid prototyping
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills — comfortable presenting to senior government or corporate stakeholders and translating between technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working with or deploying to government, public sector, or large institutional clients
• Proven ability to lead local technical teams and build capacity
• Willingness to relocate and be permanently based in the DRC for the duration of the engagement (12-24+ months)
• Language: Local language proficiency is a significant advantage

Requirements — Preferred

• Experience with data integration, ETL pipelines, and working with diverse data sources
• Experience in one or more of Sand's focus domains: health informatics/digital health, water utility operations, telecommunications network operations, or energy systems
• Familiarity with domain-specific platforms (e.g., DHIS2, OpenMRS for health; SCADA, GIS for water/energy; OSS/BSS for telecom)
• Experience with BI and dashboarding tools, particularly Apache Superset
• Experience with data transformation tools such as dbt or Airflow
• Comfort working with data dictionaries, reporting requirements, and identifying common data quality issues
• Knowledge of data security, privacy, and interoperability standards (e.g., FHIR for healthcare, GDPR, local data sovereignty requirements)
• Experience operating in resource-constrained environments (unreliable power, limited connectivity)

Work Environment

This is a permanently embedded role. You will work on-site at the Ministry of Health in the DRC 4 days per week, with 1 day for focused remote work, internal collaboration, and knowledge sharing with the broader FDE community. You should expect to be based in the DRC for a minimum of 12-24 months.

You must be self-driven, comfortable operating as Sand's primary technical representative in-country, and disciplined with online collaboration tools to stay connected with the broader Sand team across geographies. Cultural sensitivity, adaptability, and genuine interest in the local context are essential — you are not passing through, you are putting down roots.