Senior Program Officer, Integrated Surveillance NTDs

Position: Senior Program Officer, Integrated Surveillance for NTDs
The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities.

As a workplace, we're committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team
The Global Health division uses innovation, data, and partnerships to reduce global disease burdens and expand access to health services in low- and middle-income countries. The Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) team focuses on the control, elimination, and eradication of selected high-burden diseases recognized by the WHO, and on building integrated, sustainable delivery platforms that strengthen health systems more broadly.

The NTD team is structured around two closely connected functions. The Upstream team drives innovation through product development, operational research, and modeling/analytics (including the use of AI) to evidence-based policy and program decisions. The Downstream team translates this into practice through direct engagement with country programs, including the deployment of digital tools, data use activities, and implementation support. The two teams work in close collaboration: upstream innovations are designed with downstream operability in mind, and downstream experience generates the learning that sharpens upstream strategy.

The NTD team operates at a pivotal moment. Many NTD programs are approaching or have achieved transmission control milestones - creating both an opportunity and an obligation to design post-validation surveillance systems that are sensitive enough to detect resurgence, efficient enough to be domestically sustainable, and integrated enough to serve the broader health system. At the same time, the global health financing landscape is contracting sharply, with declining ODA accelerating the need for surveillance architectures that do not depend on parallel, vertically-funded systems.

The Role

The Senior Program Officer (SPO), Integrated Surveillance for NTDs will sit within the NTD Upstream team and lead the innovation agenda for post-validation NTD surveillance. The SPO will be responsible for conceptualizing the research, generating the evidence and driving consensus-building across the community to define the evidence-based strategies for integrated, post-elimination surveillance of NTDs. The SPO will define and shape the investments needed to enable progress.

This role carries a dual mandate: driving disease-specific surveillance innovation that meets the precision requirements of NTD control and elimination programs, while ensuring that the systems and tools developed are designed to contribute to and benefit from the integrated surveillance infrastructure that will serve all disease programs from a shared backbone.

The SPO will work closely with Upstream team colleagues who are responsible for product development, operational research, and modeling work streams.

The SPO will work in close collaboration with NTD Downstream colleagues who are engaged directly with country programs and responsible for deploying the digital tools and data use activities that this role helps to design and validate. The SPO will support the Downstream team's efforts to integrate NTD activity planning, execution and monitoring within wider campaign-based delivery systems.

The SPO will also collaborate actively across the foundation and with external partners who are innovating in integrated surveillance, digital health, and AI-enabled decision-making to ensure NTD investments are connected to and contributing to the broader frontier of what is possible.

This role requires a technically rigorous innovator who can translate scientific evidence into investment strategy, engage effectively with Ministries of Health and global partners, and align the NTD surveillance innovation agenda with both the foundation's disease-specific goals and the broader movement toward integrated, domestically sustainable health systems.

This is an 18-month Limited Term Employment position, relocation support to Seattle will be provided.

Areas of Work

1. NTD Surveillance Strategy - Disease-Specific and Integration-Ready

• Develop and steward an evidence-based strategy for post-elimination surveillance (PES) for each of the Foundation's six priority NTDs. Determine, for each disease, the minimum surveillance architecture needed to detect resurgence and sustain elimination, considering the optimal use of all existing integrated surveillance…