AI Research Lead - African First Language Models

Department: Technology 

Team: AI Foundry 

Location: London (Hybrid or Remote) / Nairobi

Position type: Contractor (umbrella – inside IR35) until 24th December 2026; Full Time 

What the hiring manager says 

 
"The Africa AI Language Initiative is one of our most strategically important efforts — aiming to build Africa-first, open, locally representative AI models across the continent’s most widely spoken languages. As our Subject Matter Expert, you will play a pivotal role in shaping model design, guiding technical execution, and ensuring high-quality delivery across multiple partners." 

Director of AI Initiatives 

About the team 

 
The Africa AI Language Initiative brings together mobile operators, African researchers, startups, academia, and GSMA to build and deploy open, representative language models for Africa. The team is multidisciplinary — spanning AI research, data governance, telco engagement, technical programme delivery, and community development. 

About the role 

 
You will guide the development of 3–5 Africa-first open language models end-to-end, acting as the technical anchor and coordinator across multiple model-building tracks. You will ensure alignment between researchers, operators, and partners, while driving high-quality technical outcomes, documentation, and model readiness. 

About you

You will bring demonstrable experience in developing and evaluating language models, with a strong grounding in NLP techniques relevant to African languages. You’ll be able to work across diverse linguistic structures—such as tonal variation, agglutination, rich morphology, and non-standardised orthographies—to ensure that models reflect real-world language use across the continent. Your ability to analyse datasets, identify representational gaps, and guide the creation of high-quality corpora will directly shape the performance and inclusiveness of our Africa first models. 

You’ll be comfortable working end-to-end across the research workflow: from tokenisation strategies suitable for low resource languages, to training and finetuning multilingual models, to designing evaluation methods that capture linguistic nuance. You will apply your technical depth to help partners understand model behaviour, tradeoffs, and opportunities for improvement. You’ll communicate these insights clearly, helping a broad ecosystem—including operators, researchers, community groups, and developers—collaborate effectively around open model development. 

You’ll be curious and adaptable, able to test new methods quickly while maintaining scientific rigour. Through structured documentation, reproducible experimentation, and responsible data practices, you’ll help ensure these open models meet the highest standards for transparency and reliability. 

About your skills

You will bring demonstrable experience in NLP/LLMs, especially for multilingual or low-resource languages, and the ability to coordinate complex technical programmes. You’ll need to communicate effectively across teams, drive delivery, and work autonomously while contributing to a collaborative ecosystem.

Core skills:
•    Data Analysis
You’ll apply analytical rigour to evaluate datasets and model outputs, identifying linguistic patterns, bias risks, and areas for improving representation across African languages.
•    AI Research
You’ll explore and adapt advanced NLP techniques—including tokenisation, alignment, and evaluation methods—to address the challenges of low-resource and morphologically rich languages.
•    Communication
You’ll translate complex technical concepts into clear, accessible explanations for partners across Africa, enabling shared understanding of modelling decisions and outcomes.
•    Delivery
You’ll drive research workstreams with structure and consistency, ensuring training runs, evaluations, documentation, and model releases are delivered to a high technical standard.
•    Stakeholder Management
You’ll collaborate confidently with researchers, operators, universities, and data communities, ensuring alignment on linguistic priorities, data quality, and model behaviour.
 

Contract type

Short term Contractor

Worker type

Contingent Worker

What We Offer

Working at the GSMA offers you unparalleled access to the mobile industry. We offer a chance to truly shape the direction of mobile, whatever your role. By joining the GSMA, you will be exposed to a fast-paced rapidly evolving environment, working on global solutions, genuinely fascinating and industry-changing projects and a stimulating and dynamic environment designed to enable you to flourish.

In addition to architect-designed offices and competitive compensation, our benefits include fantastic learning & development opportunities, generous holiday allowances, four additional days off for professional development and many others.

To learn more about the GSMA, visit our career site, our LinkedIn page and our Twitter page.

Being You at the GSMA

We care deeply about diversity, equity and inclusivity and aspire to be the best at it. Your well-being and work/life balance is important, so flexi-time and remote working is available to all staff. We're keen to ensure everyone is equal, represented and connected so we particularly encourage applications from all demographics. The sucess of the GSMA year on year will continue to be contributed by people from all walks of life.

GSMA Values

Our values not only drive our culture – they shape how we work and interact inside and outside our global organisation.

Passionately driven

We approach everything we do with unparalleled capability, tenacity and commitment, knowing that the challenging scale, pace and complexity of our work is what leads to its world-changing impact.

Insightful leaders

We continually develop and engage our expertise, insight and creativity so that we’re always ready to respond to the changing landscape with authority, agility and nuance.

Stronger together

We lean on each other so the industry can lean on us, embracing our diversity by actively seeking out perspectives and skill sets beyond our own, fuelling each other’s successes and constantly asking how we can help.

Underpinning our values is our collective mindset to show up purposefully as good human beings every day, in every situation. When we’re at our best – we are collaborative, considerate and compassionate to others, and we create a safe space for one another to thrive, assuming positive intent in our colleagues. And if we aren’t at our best and the pressure is on – we feel free to be ourselves but still remain curious, lean into the tough stuff and we are always respectful to others and accountable for the part we play.