Position Overview

Educate!, the largest youth skills service provider in East Africa is looking for a dynamic and enthusiastic People Operations Manager who will play a critical operational leadership role in ensuring the smooth functioning of Educate!’s people operations in Tanzania. This position combines strategic oversight with hands-on execution across recruitment, employee experience, performance management, compliance, and HR administration. Working closely with the Managing Director and the Global People Team, the People Operations Manager ensures that Educate! maintains a culturally aligned, compliant, and high-performing team. The ideal candidate is systems-oriented, detail-driven, and passionate about building strong employee experiences that empower teams to perform at their best. 

What You’ll Do🌟

Talent & Employee Experience – 30%

• Support recruitment processes for both field and office-based teams in collaboration with implementation and global talent teams, ensuring timely, equitable, and quality hires aligned with Educate!’s values.
• Establish strong systems for field team recruitment, onboarding, and short-term contract tracking to support program agility. 
• Oversee onboarding and offboarding processes to ensure seamless employee transitions and a positive employee experience. 
• Drive initiatives that build and sustain Educate!’s culture, including team socials, engagement programs, and feedback mechanisms.
• Lead culture pulse surveys and develop actionable insights to enhance staff engagement and retention in liaison with the HRBP. 

Performance Management & Capacity Building - 30%

• Oversee implementation of Educate!’s performance management systems, including PDPs, quarterly performance conversations, and annual reviews. 
• Manage the probation process for all new hires, ensuring timely feedback and documentation. 
• Coordinate and deliver new manager training and capacity-building initiatives across teams.
• Work closely with the MD and HRBP to develop workforce plans aligned to program and organizational priorities.

HR Administration - 20%

• Oversee monthly payroll processing and ensure accuracy in statutory contributions and filings.
• Manage staff benefits, including health insurance, airtime credit, staff transport reimbursements, and staff loans.
• Develop and track HR budgets, manage BVAs, and coordinate closely with Finance for expenditure control and reporting.
• Maintain accurate and updated HR data systems (e.g., BambooHR), ensuring data integrity and timely reporting.
• Continuously improve HR administrative systems and workflows for operational efficiency and scalability.

Legal Compliance & Risk Management - 20%

• Ensure Tanzania HR practices are fully compliant with Tanzanian labor laws and other relevant national regulations.
• Manage visa and work permit processes for all international staff, coordinating with legal partners and internal stakeholders. Serve as a point of contact for immigration-related processes, including work permits, visas, and renewals, working closely with the HR coordinator and the legal firms.
• Serve as the primary contact for all immigration-related processes, including visa and work permit applications and renewals for international staff in close collaboration with legal partners and other internal stakeholders.
• Manage the relationship with external legal counsel, ensuring up-to-date labor law compliance and proactive issue resolution.
• Oversee OSHA registration, workplace safety standards, and implementation of compliance audits.
• Draft and manage employment contracts, HR policies, and compliance documentation in collaboration with the law firm and relevant authorities.
• Identify and mitigate HR-related risks through effective policy enforcement and compliance monitoring.
• Proactively identify HR risks and put mitigation strategies in place. 

Additional Responsibilities

As a key partner in organizational leadership, you represent HR to ensure people-focused thinking is embedded in strategic decisions. Keeping the Managing Director and HR Business Partner informed on internal dynamics, emerging trends, and labor developments will be part of how you drive smart, timely actions. In leading the HR Coordinator, you bring clarity, mentorship, and effective delegation to help the team thrive. With a strong commitment to equity, inclusion, and staff well-being, you help shape an employee experience that’s both supportive and fair at every stage.

Who You Are 🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️

You’ve built a solid foundation in HR, with at least 4 years of experience and significant portion of that spent managing operations, compliance, and people. You have a solid grasp of Tanzanian labor laws, from payroll and benefits to workplace compliance and immigration requirements. You’ve set up or improved HR systems to support growing or dispersed teams, and you're comfortable using tools like BambooHR to keep things running smoothly. You communicate clearly, handle sensitive matters with care, and build trust across all levels. Experience in a fast-paced NGO or social enterprise is a plus. Most importantly, you’re someone who takes initiative, solves problems as they arise, and helps teams thrive while keeping people, processes, and policies aligned.

Terms

The location is in Dar es salaam, Tanzania

What We Offer 

• A vibrant, mission-driven environment with a supportive and fun team. 
• Competitive salary based on experience.
• Learning & growth opportunities  

Application Process: Rolling basis, interviews happening soon!

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 Tanzania. Unlike our roaming FDE roles, this is a permanently embedded position. You will be based full-time within the Ministry of Health in Tanzania, 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 Tanzania

• 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 Tanzania 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 Tanzania 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 Zanzania 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.