Lead, Digital Public Infrastructure, ICDIA Programme

Position: Lead, Digital Public Infrastructure, ICDIA Programme Team: AI and Digital Transformation Level and grade: L6 Associate Director Position type: Full time, permanent Location: Bengaluru, India. Remote only in rare exceptions. Reports to: Team Lead, ICDIA Programme Travel: 25 percent, primarily domestic Mandate: Technical sign-off on transferability and digital public goods readiness About Us APLYD helps governments, multilateral institutions, development finance institutions and foundations use AI in public systems. Most public-sector AI stops at the pilot. Our work is getting it into everyday service delivery and keeping it running once we leave. Athena Infonomics has done this work for years. In 2026 we set it up as its own company. We cover strategy and readiness, field data and last-mile reach, design and build, evaluation and audit, and scale and production. 440+ engagements · 240+ global clients · 85+ specialists · 7 countries · 5 continents The Role You own the supply side. India has around thirty solutions on the Digital Public Goods Alliance registry by origin country, stewarded largely by foundations, academic institutions and multilateral bodies. There is significant headroom for government-stewarded solutions, and that is where ICDIA has a role to play. Getting there is technical work rather than administrative work. Public digital systems everywhere are built, procured and licensed for domestic delivery first, and preparing them for open stewardship takes deliberate engineering and licensing effort. You run the pipeline that takes a candidate solution from a transferability judgement, through strengthening against the digital public goods standard, to registration and sustained stewardship. Core Job Responsibilities Judge transferability. Apply the framework across India's platform portfolio. Separate the transferable core, meaning the protocol, reference application, data schema and API specification, from India-specific dependencies such as Aadhaar-linked authentication, and classify each dependency as removable, substitutable or structural. Resolve licensing and ownership. Who owns the code, the data and the dependent components, whether current licensing permits open release, and the negotiation where rights are shared with a private vendor. Run the strengthening pipeline. Open licensing across code, data and any model components. An unambiguous stewardship record with a single accountable steward. Abstraction of India-specific dependencies behind clean interfaces, with at least one working configuration on substitutable infrastructure. Evidence practice rather than intent. Privacy, security and do-no-harm are evidenced through demonstrable practice: data minimisation, consent, retention and deletion, access controls and governance. The 2025 revisions to the standard raised the bar on these indicators. Take solutions through registration. Eligibility self-assessment before formal submission,…