HR (Associate) Director, AI Access Initiative (EAII Advisors)
Evidence Action · New Delhi
About The AI Access Initiative
We're at an inflection point in artificial intelligence – presenting both tremendous potential opportunity and risk for people in developing countries. AI capabilities are improving on a timescale measured in months, while development systems often move on timescales measured in decades. Much of the technology needed for positive impact exists today, but few organizations exist to bridge research, deployment, and scaled implementation: we must act now to ensure AI's benefits reach people in poverty in LMICs.
Incubated at Evidence Action, we're scaling The AI Access Initiative, an organization focused on scaling AI-enabled 'big bets' to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of people in poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We operate at the intersection of global development actors, top AI labs, and leading researchers to drive meaningful access to AI's benefits for the 3.5 billion people living in poverty globally. We create "public good," open-sourced playbooks, toolkits, and insights that define how to design and launch tractable and impactful AI-enabled programs. Given the scale of opportunity, we expect our portfolio to expand substantially, but to start, we're scaling two programs focused on AI in Agriculture and AI in Health.
- Agriculture: We have an ambitious goal to reach 100M+ farmers with AI-enabled weather forecasts, expand forecast R&D to generate novel forecasts, and build public and private sector (WhatsApp, telcos) delivery channels to deliver new, LLM-generated voice and image content that maximizes behavior change.
- Health: Here, our initial goal is to scale AI-enabled clinical decision support to 20M+ people via telemedicine platforms, dramatically improving diagnosis and health outcomes at a national level. We are also planning to explore and test novel interventions for low-resource settings, including direct-to-consumer (DTC) health interventions.
We are led by former Evidence Action CEO Kanika Bahl, a founding member of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, and advised by Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; and Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs for Alphabet and Google. This work builds on Evidence Action's track record reaching 530M+ people with cost-effective, evidence-based programs across 9 countries in Africa and Asia, with a focus on last-mile delivery.
About 2AI India and EAII Advisors
EAII Advisors, Evidence Action's technical partner in India, supports state governments in delivering evidence-based public health programs. Operating across 10 states, EAII Advisors provides technical assistance to ministries of health, education, water, and women and child development, reducing health burdens in impoverished communities and improving the long-term wellbeing of children and families.
2AI India is being incubated as a project within EAII Advisors, with plans to spin off into an independent entity at the end of this year. We are hiring a founding team: the first hires will shape the culture, establish the operating model, and own early wins before the organization scales.
Roles and Responsibilities
The HR Lead's primary mandate is establishing the cultural foundation and talent engine that sustains quality through rapid growth. This is strategic, high-leverage work: designing the onboarding experience, the ways of working, and the early culture infrastructure that will shape how 2AI India operates as it scales, and finding and retaining the talent that will deliver on 2AI’s mission.
Entity compliance and HR systems are real responsibilities, but they can be supported by the Chief of Staff or through external partners and retained recruiters while the organization is small. This is a founding member of the leadership team, setting the tone for leadership and management expectation as well as modeling values alignment across the organization.
Culture Design and Stewardship
- Designs and owns the founding culture infrastructure for 2AI India: the ways of working, the norms, and the recurring moments that reinforce them.
- Thinks carefully about what founding culture means here and is accountable for getting it right, understanding that early culture is disproportionately hard to change later.
- Builds a culture that connects meaningfully to the broader global 2AI organization, not only to the India office.
- Maintains culture through growth, which is a different problem from establishing it.
Talent Strategy
- Brings strong but adaptable perspectives on staff resourcing in a dynamic growth stage; advises on team structure, hiring needs, and sequencing.
- Designs an onboarding experience that connects new hires to the mission, to each other, and to what great performance looks like in this organization.
Talent Sourcing and Assessment
- Attracts talent who may not apply through standard channels, and builds warm pipelines before the roles are open.
- Manages part-time or consultant recruiters now and brings on full-time recruiting capacity as hiring accelerates.
- Designs structured hiring processes with consistent, criteria-based assessment, including for the culture attributes that matter as much as technical fit.
- Coaches hiring managers to be good interviewers who give calibrated feedback and decide efficiently.
Talent Density and Performance
- Builds a picture of who is performing at or above expectations, who is developing, and who is at risk, and helps managers act on it.
- Coaches leaders through underperformance situations with accountability to the mission and care for the individual.
HR Systems and Compliance
- Understands the HR infrastructure needs of a rapidly growing organization and builds right-sized systems to meet them.
- Manages compliance and employment obligations, working with EAII, 3rd party payroll, or other external partners where appropriate, without letting it become the core job.
- Uses data to inform people decisions, including headcount, hiring velocity, attrition, and compensation equity.
Strategic Thought Partnership
- Advises on people decisions including hiring, team structure, or difficult personnel situations.
- Handles sensitive situations with discretion and judgment, and knows when to escalate, resolve directly, or bring in external expertise.
Disclaimer: The duties and responsibilities described are not a comprehensive list and additional tasks may be assigned to the employee from time to time.
Requirements
Essentials:
- Relevant professional background: 10-12 years in HR, people operations, or talent roles, with meaningful time in organizations where you had to build rather than inherit
- Culture building: has built and maintained a strong, positive team or organizational culture, and has done so during a period of growth rather than in steady state
- Global orientation: has worked with or within a globally distributed team, and understands the practical dynamics of time zones, cultural difference in feedback, and connecting a country office to a global organization
- Talent acquisition: full-cycle recruiting experience including sourcing and closing senior hires in competitive or thin talent markets, through non-traditional channels rather than job boards alone
- Assessment instincts: strong judgment on fit beyond credentials, and the discipline to build structured processes rather than relying on that judgment alone
- Onboarding and development: has designed onboarding or development experiences that measurably changed how new hires performed, and can describe what worked and what did not
- Systems building: has judgment about what HR infrastructure an organization of this size actually needs, the restraint not to build for a size it is not yet, and an eye for how a new process will land on the people using it
- Compliance literacy: understands Indian employment and HR compliance requirements well enough to manage them through external partners, and knows when to call for expert input
- Discretion: exercises judgment with confidential material and does not let a difficult situation sit because it is uncomfortable
- Data-driven: strong analytical instincts. Builds the tools and runs the analysis themselves rather than waiting for a dedicated analyst
- Self-awareness: humility, low ego, no task too small, and the ability to see other perspectives and acknowledge blind spots
- AI-forward: curious and experimental with AI tools, including in sourcing, assessment, and people processes, with judgment about where they help and where they do not
- Comfort with ambiguity: thrives in high-growth scenarios and is comfortable with shifting timelines and priorities
What Success Looks Like
In the First 6 Months:
- A structured hiring plan exists, including a recruitment process, and is in use across open roles, with defined criteria and interviewers who have been coached to assess against them
- The onboarding experience is designed and has been run with real new hires, and their first 90 days look different because of it
- Compliance and HR systems are running reliably through the right mix of internal ownership and external partners
- A founding 2AI India retreat has taken place, reinforcing a founding culture that is articulated in a form the team recognizes and uses
- Strong alignment with 2AI global people & talent, ensuring a single-organization culture and approach to shared systems
Compensation : Competitive and commensurate with the individual's credentials, experience, and previous pay scale.
Benefits
EAII provides a comprehensive benefits package for employees. Benefits include:
- Comprehensive health insurance with IPD and OPD provisions
- Life and Accidental insurance
- PF, ESIC and Gratuity as per statutory requirements
- Generous leave
- Mental and physical wellbeing benefits
- Learning & Development benefits
- Avenues for engagement and recognition
Note: This role will be open for applications until October 30, 2026. Please apply at your earliest convenience. We may close this search earlier than the specified date if we find the right fit. Due to the volume of applications received, we will only be able to contact shortlisted candidates.