Chief People Officer at The AI Access Initiative (2AI)

The AI Access Initiative (2AI) is at an inflection point in artificial intelligence, aiming to bridge the gap between AI research, deployment, and scaled implementation to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of people in poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Incubated at Evidence Action, 2AI is scaling AI-enabled programs in Agriculture and Health across Africa and Asia.

The Role

The AI Access Initiative is at an early and critical juncture. We’re building a high-performing, globally distributed team from the ground up. We are hiring a Chief People Officer to define and scale people operations for our team. This includes building lean systems to hire, onboard, and retain top talent to unlock meaningful upside for people in poverty globally. While we are currently incubated at Evidence Action, we plan to spin out on November 1, 2026, as an independent organization.

The CPO will lead the global talent and human resource function, support regional and country HR teams, and report directly to the CEO. You care deeply about the mission and want to support the team’s growth, wellbeing, and ability to focus on work that matters, while building an AI-native systems and culture. You are a fast-moving but thoughtful builder, excited to drive the engine behind the growth of a fast-scaling organization—growing by 40+ people in the coming year alone—and committed to creating a team of “A” players.

You Will:

Design and execute the strategy for the People function:

• Set the vision and build out the strategy for the talent structure and function, ensuring an integrated people function (acquisition, retention/development, and HR administration) is aligned to our organizational values and priorities.
• Create an AI-native set of people systems and processes, ensuring AI drives efficiencies across recruitment, onboarding, hiring, and performance management while fostering an AI-native culture.

Build the hiring engine

• Own recruiting end-to-end, including sourcing, pipeline development, structured assessment design, offer construction, and closing.
• Build pipelines before they are needed, developing sourcing strategies and maintaining warm networks in markets where top talent is scarce.
• Design structured hiring processes with rigorous assessments, ensuring every role has identified key criteria, consistent evaluation, and interview panels that systematically test for core criteria and cultural fit.
• Assess AI engagement in candidates, designing creative processes to evaluate how candidates use AI tools and maintaining a current picture of frontier fluency in tools and capabilities.
• Build hiring capacity across the organization, coaching hiring managers to be exceptional interviewers, give calibrated feedback, and make decisions efficiently.

Design the organization

• Design structure ahead of growth, partnering with leadership on role design, team boundaries, reporting structures, and the sequencing of hires.
• Build and maintain high talent density, creating a culture where excellence is recognized and areas of growth are rapidly addressed.
• Navigate performance issues with good judgment, coaching leaders to move quickly from diagnosis to clear feedback to decisive action.
• Connect talent insights to organizational planning, translating the talent picture into concrete decisions on headcount, development investment, and role structuring.

Build people systems that scale

• Own the cultural formation in a global context, understanding and supporting cross-cultural teams while maintaining a shared, global culture.
• Design onboarding that sets people up for success, orienting new hires to the mission, their role, values, the team, and what great performance looks like.
• Design a performance system people find genuinely useful, creating a process for honest conversations, meaningful development, and clear expectations.
• Build compensation frameworks that are equitable and defensible across geographies, operating across LMIC and high-income country contexts.
• Use data and AI to drive people decisions, building and maintaining tools and dashboards for headcount, attrition, hiring velocity, compensation equity, and team health.
• Stand up the people infrastructure for an independent entity, sourcing and managing a professional employer organization (PEO) or employer of record (EOR), and building employment contracts, payroll, benefits, and policies.
• Ensure compliance and safeguarding across operating jurisdictions, understanding labor law landscapes and establishing codes of conduct, reporting channels, and investigation protocols.
• Own workforce planning and the people budget, partnering with the CFO to build headcount plans and cost models.

Strategic thought partnership

• Be brought in early on people decisions, building credibility with leaders so they consult you on hires, team structures, or difficult personnel situations.
• Push back when something doesn’t feel right, ensuring alignment with structured processes and organizational needs.
• Handle sensitive employee situations with discretion and judgment, knowing when to escalate, resolve directly, or bring in external expertise.

Requirements

This role is for someone comfortable standing up hiring, performance, and compensation systems from scratch. Our ability to act at speed depends on getting the right people into the right seats repeatedly.

We are actively scoping leadership roles and structure, reflecting the dynamism of this fast-growing phase of the organization. Evidence Action is open to candidates across a range of seniority levels for this role; title, scope, and compensation will be assessed candidly.

You will likely have:

• 12+ years in human resources, people operations, or talent roles, including senior leadership of a people function, with meaningful time spent in organizations requiring you to build rather than inherit systems.
• A track record as a builder, having designed hiring, performance, or compensation systems from scratch.
• Demonstrated experience in full-cycle recruiting, including sourcing and closing senior hires in competitive or thin-talent markets.
• Experience working in or across LMIC contexts, understanding distributed workforce dynamics, labor law variability, compensation equity, and cultural nuances of feedback.
• A track record of credibility with senior leaders, having been brought in early, pushed back when necessary, and trusted with sensitive situations.
• Strong analytical instincts, building tools and analyzing data yourself rather than relying on a dedicated analyst.
• Curiosity and creativity with AI tools, including a testing mindset and eagerness to experiment with emerging technologies.
• Comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration, balancing high EQ, rigor, and throughput with levity and humility.
• Experience standing up employment infrastructure for a new or spinning-out entity is a strong plus.