This position is supported by the Global Fund’s 2024–2026 Digital Health Impact Accelerator Strategic Initiative (DHIA SI), which aims to accelerate digital transformation of health systems in sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative focuses on strengthening interoperability for integrated, patient-centered data exchange, while building national capacity, supporting digital health architecture and strategy, and ensuring sustainability and measurable impact.

Under this initiative, JSI is providing technical assistance to the Ethiopia Ministry of Health to design, pilot, and institutionalize a National Digital Health Interoperability Highway. The project will assess current gaps, benchmark global best practices, develop a national interoperability blueprint, test priority use cases in a controlled environment, and develop 5-year implementation and 10-year and investment plans, while building lasting national capacity to govern and sustain interoperability.

Duty Station: JSI Ethiopia Country Office (with Frequent engagement with MOH and partners)
Employment Type: Full-time
Reporting Line: Senior Digital Health Specialist and Interoperability Lead

 The Digital Health Specialist will serve as the technical lead for the Interoperability Highway initiative. This role is responsible for ensuring the end-to-end technical coherence, global experience, standards compliance, and future-proof design of Ethiopia’s national interoperability infrastructure. The position focuses on architecture leadership, systems thinking, global best-practice adaptation, investment planning, and delivery assurance, working closely with the embedded MoH advisor to ensure alignment between strategy, design, and national ownership.

 Duties and Responsibilities:

Leadership & Technical Strategy

• Lead the overall vision and design strategy for the Interoperability Highway.

• Ensure alignment of the Interoperability Highway with Ethiopia's Digital Health Blueprint and Enterprise Architecture, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) principles, and Global Interoperability Standards and Reference Architectures. 

• Define the highway blueprint that is scalable, secure, and modular.

Global Benchmarking & Standards Alignment

• Lead adapting/adopting against global interoperability models (e.g., X-Road, ADM).

• Define standards profiles, protocols, and implementation guidance tailored to Ethiopia.

• Ensure adoption of best practices in: API management and gateways; security, authentication, and authorization; and, event-driven and service-oriented architectures

Blueprint Development & Technical Documentation

• Lead development of the Interoperability Highway Architectural Blueprint, including: logical and physical architecture diagrams, standards specifications, system requirements, and, governance and sustainability

• Ensure documentation meets both technical rigor and policy usability standards.

Pilot Design & Technical Oversight

• Guide technical design and configuration of pilot interoperability use cases.

• Provide quality assurance on middleware, registries, APIs, and security configurations.

• Ensure pilots generate actionable evidence for national scale-up.

Implementation Planning & Investment Analysis

• Lead development of the 5-year cost implementation roadmap.

• Lead preparation of the 10-year investment case, including cost-benefit analysis and sustainability modeling.

• Support alignment with national investment planning processes and donor requirements.

Capacity Building & Knowledge Leadership

• Support development of technical training materials and architecture guidance.

• Mentor national and project-level technical teams on interoperability design and implementation.

• Contribute to regional and global knowledge sharing through JSI platforms.

Job Requirements

• MSc in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems, or related field.

• Minimum 7 years of experience in digital health systems, enterprise architecture, or large-scale interoperability initiatives.

• Proven experience leading national or multi-system interoperability architectures.

• Strong hands-on knowledge of:

  • HL7 FHIR, OpenHIE, terminology services.

  • API gateways, middleware, event-driven architectures

  • Security and data protection frameworks.

  • Software Design and Architecture.

  • Proficiency in programming languages such as Java, Python, and JavaScript, along with experience using frameworks like Spring Boot, Node.js, and Django. 

  • Familiarity with databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB.

• Experience developing investment cases and long-term digital infrastructure roadmaps.

• Strong analytical writing and technical documentation skills.

• Experience working with donors, governments, and global health organizations.

Core Competencies

• Systems architecture and interoperability design.

• Strategic planning and investment analysis.

• Global goods and local adaptation.

• Technical leadership and quality assurance.

• Cross-organizational collaboration.

 JSI/WEI is a child-safe organization, and the safety and well-being of children is a priority of our organization. We have robust recruitment procedures to ensure that all staff are suited to work with the children served by our programs.

JSI/WEI is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer committed to workplace diversity. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all qualified applicants and employees without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, creed, religion, gender, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, sexual preference, genetic information, political affiliation, or protected veteran status in any employment decisions. M/F/V/D

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