About UNICEF

If you are a committed, creative professional and are passionate about making a lasting difference for children, the world's leading children's rights organization would like to hear from you. For 70 years, UNICEF has been working on the ground in 190 countries and territories to promote children's survival, protection and development. The world's largest provider of vaccines fordeveloping countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff in more than 145 countries.

Consultancy: Machine Learning Engineering Consultant     

Duty Station: Data and Analytics, DAPM  

Duration: 1 December 2025 – 30 November 2026   

Home/ Office Based: Remote

 

BACKGROUND

Purpose of Activity/ Assignment:

The consultant will work in the Data and Analytics Section of the Office of Strategy and Evidence to support projects and activities related to machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), data analysis, and information extraction.

 

In particular, the consultant will:

• Maintain and optimize the vaccine stockout machine learning model already trained for UNICEF’s Program Group Immunization Division, ensuring its accuracy, performance, and sustainability.
• Continue to enhance methods for large-scale data and information extraction from diverse and unstructured document sources for the West Central Africa Region Social Policy teams and the WASH Analytics team before moving to additional domains.
• Support the development of automated briefs and reports generation pipelines.
• Test, evaluate, and implement robust frameworks for (semi)-automated GenAI report and data quality assurance.
• Contribute to geospatial (GIS) and AI-related initiatives, particularly as part of the Frontier Data Network Ahead of the Storm project.
• Provide technical advice on AI/ML approaches.
• Build reproducible workflows and contribute to machine learning and GenAI knowledge transfer within the team

Scope of Work:

• Maintain, retrain, and document existing ML models in production when new data or new features are available.
• AI assisted data and information extraction from unstructured documents.
• Prototypes and production-ready solutions for automated reporting.
• Contributions to GIS and AI project outputs.
• Define automated, AI driven data tests, also over GenAI outputs.

Terms of Reference / Key Deliverables:

Work Assignment Overview/Deliverables and Outputs/Delivery deadline

1.  Support Data and Analytics Section development of GenAI Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) driven SDG Country Briefs

-  RAG system that generates SDG country briefs that are contextualized per country with actionable information that helps countries understand where they are and are not meeting their SDG targets

31 December 2025

2.  Support UNICEF teams in extracting budget lines from governments’ public budget documents (particularly child- related budget items) data from unstructured documents for West Central Africa extract. The tool must be designed to be adaptable for extracting information in any domain

-  A generic data extraction pipeline using the most appropriate technologies (e.g., Data Bricks, Microsoft Document Intelligence and custom machine learning models) that retrieve and structure relevant data and  information from unstructured budget documents so that non-technical users can query and retrieve the structured data they require to analyse and track (including over time, through time series) national spending on child-related budget items

28 February 2026

3.  Develop and deploy a user-friendly interface for non-technical programme teams to work with the document extraction tool for extracting information on child-related budget items.

-  Data Bricks/Microsoft Document Intelligence data extraction pipeline equipped with a user-friendly interface to extract information on child-related expenditures from unstructured national budget documents, including dynamic links to sources of every number, LLM-generated analysis, time series, and charts.

31 March 2026

4.  Coordinate with stakeholders (PG-I, DAPM) to support maintenance of the released vaccine stockout model. Retrain as new data sources become available and assist in deployment as required

-  Vaccine stockout model maintained and integrated with the existing data pipeline and producing predictions consumable by Power BI and other systems for the current set of 30 countries

30 June 2026

5.  Automated AI driven data and RAG-generated report QA - Research phase?

-  Test and report results from multiple evaluation frameworks, including but not limited to DeepEval, LangChain Evaluation, TruLens, and RAGAS.

31 April 2026

6.  Automated AI driven data and RAG-generated report QA - Implementation phase?

-  Implement into the production lifecycle and document the evaluation framework(s) that deliver the best results for the SDG Country Briefs and Document Extraction products

30 May 2026

7.  Work with D&A Geospatial lead to integrate the use of satellite embedding datasets to drive new geospatial analytics in our enterprise geospatial and data platforms

-  Geospatial foundation models integrated into data and analytics workstreams, available through the Data and Analytics section Data Bricks environment and optionally Snowflake

31 July 2026

Technical engagement with leading AI experts for Ahead of the Storm (e.g. ECWF, Copernicus, Universities and researchers in Provate Sector)

8.  Problem preparation and technical support of external engagement

-  Pitch (2-pager and presentation), data preparation and demo materials needed to engage with leading expert on a technical collaboration for AoS, plus code and analysis (technical paper)

31 August 2026

9.  Integrate outcomes of collaboration in UNICEF pipelines

-  Implement and deliver coded and documented automated data pipelines for the Ahead of the Storm analytics platform.

31 September 2026

Country Office implementation of Ahead of the Storm

10. Algorithm development 

-  Develop, document, and present the machine learning models and GenAI solutions used to deliver analytics results for Ahead of the Storm

31 Oct 2026

11. Assist team in building MVP

-  Implement country-specific, tailored, coded and documented automated data pipelines for the Ahead of the Storm analytics platform

30 November 2026

Travel:

2 visits to Valencia for AI Hub collaboration 

2 visits to Florence for team meetings 

Qualifications

Education:

University degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and related fields

Knowledge/Expertise/Skills required *:

• 5+ years proven experience in developing, training, and deploying machine learning models, particularly for supply chain optimization or similar logistical challenges.
• Expertise in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning techniques.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Experience using machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Scikit-learn.
• Strong experience with deploying machine learning models in cloud environments, particularly Microsoft Azure.
• Familiarity with Azure Machine Learning, Azure Functions, Azure Databricks, or similar services.
• Experience building and deploying GenAI services, including RAG, RPA, and agentic.
• Expertise wrangling big data and large datasets, including data cleaning, feature engineering, data extraction, and data visualization.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams.

Good-to-have Skills: 

• Previous experience building robust data pipelines using queueing and stream processing, asynchronous patterns, parallelization, e.g., with PySpark, etc.
• Understanding of vaccine supply chains, including distribution strategies, cold chain logistics, and challenges faced at subnational levels.
• Ability to translate complex supply chain problems into data-driven models and solutions.
• Previous experience in similar consulting roles, particularly in global health or public health contexts, is highly desirable.

Requirements:

Completed profile in UNICEF's e-Recruitment system and

- Upload copy of academic credentials

- Financial proposal that will include/ reflect :

• • the costs per each deliverable and the total lump-sum for the whole assignment (in US$) to undertake the terms of reference.
  • travel costs and daily subsistence allowance, if internationally recruited or travel is required as per TOR.
  • Any other estimated costs: visa, health insurance, and living costs as applicable.
  • Indicate your availability

- Any emergent / unforeseen duty travel and related expenses will be covered by UNICEF.

- At the time the contract is awarded, the selected candidate must have in place current health insurance coverage.

- Payment of professional fees will be based on submission of agreed satisfactory deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.

U.S. Visa information:

With the exception of the US Citizens, G4 Visa and Green Card holders, should the selected candidate and his/her household members reside in the United States under a different visa, the consultant and his/her household members are required to change their visa status to G4, and the consultant’s household members (spouse) will require an Employment Authorization Card (EAD) to be able to work, even if he/she was authorized to work under the visa held prior to switching to G4.  

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF’s core values of Commitment, Diversity and Integrity and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results. View our competency framework at: Here

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment. 

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check. 

Remarks:  

Individuals engaged under a consultancy will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants. Consultants are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws. 

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.