VP Delivery
Own country deployments end-to-end: from Ministry signing through live deployment through steady-state support. Scale Opian's reach across Sub-Saharan Africa while building a repeatable playbook.
About the role
Opian is in Ethiopia at national scale. Nigeria is next, with Tanzania and Uganda in parallel. You'll own the full deployment arc for each country: site selection and assessment, stakeholder alignment, technical rollout, training, live support, and the feedback loop back to product.
This is operational leadership, not sales. You work closely with Ministries, hospital leadership, logistics coordinators, and the engineering team. You translate Ministry requirements into product roadmap items. You're comfortable in a healthcare facility at 5am reviewing an implementation with staff, then explaining system architecture to a Director-General.
You'll build a deployment playbook that's repeatable but flexible enough to adapt to each country's context. You'll hire and train country-level implementation leads who report to you. You'll travel heavily in year one — expect 60% of your time on the ground in Nigeria, Tanzania, or Uganda.
What you will own
- Country go-to-market: site selection, stakeholder mapping, regulatory navigation, contract negotiation
- Deployment planning and execution: rollout timeline, training curriculum, data migration, cutover readiness
- Live support and handoff: on-the-ground troubleshooting, escalation paths, steady-state support model
- Deployment playbook: document what works so the next country deployment is faster and more reliable
- Country team hiring: recruit and develop implementation leads who can operate independently in each country
Year one goals
- Nigeria: from Ministry signing to live deployment across 10+ facilities by Q3 2027, with a country implementation lead in place by end of year
- Tanzania and Uganda: complete feasibility studies, clarify procurement and regulatory paths, establish Ministry partnerships
- Deployment playbook: document lessons from Ethiopia and Nigeria into a repeatable process for the next country
- Build the country operations function: 2-3 implementation leads hired and ramped on Opian's context and methods
What we are looking for
- 5+ years implementing health systems or digital health programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. You've done government contracts, you know how ministries move, you understand the messy reality of health supply chains.
- Comfortable with heavy travel in year one — Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda. By year 2 you'll be more Addis-based, but you're building something that requires your presence at the ground level.
- Bilingual a plus (English + French), but core skill is the ability to build trust with Ministry officials, hospital leadership, and facility staff. You can talk architecture to engineers and talk outcomes to planners.
- Operational excellence: you care about timelines, handoffs, and whether the implementation actually works. You're not precious about method — you adapt to each country's reality.
- Belief in the mission: you understand why accurate forecasting in a national supply chain matters, and you're excited to be the person making it real across countries.
How we interview
Initial call
A 30-minute conversation with someone from the team — usually the role's direct manager. We talk about your background, what you're looking for, and why Opian. We're looking for genuine interest in health systems and a communication style that works for us.
Craft interview or case
Depending on the role, this might be a take-home assignment (CTO candidates do a system design; data candidates might analyze a dataset) or a live conversation around a case study from our work. We're not testing trivia — we want to see how you think through ambiguity.
Team conversations
You'll talk with 2-3 people you'd work closely with: the CTO, Head of Data, or VP Delivery. These are working conversations, not interrogations. We talk about how we ship, how we disagree, how we debug.
Offer
If we're both excited, we make an offer. Compensation is competitive, commensurate with experience, plus meaningful equity and relocation support where relevant.
About Opian
Opian builds decision systems for health supply chains and clinical care. ForLab+ helps countries forecast drug, vaccine, and test demand across thousands of facilities. Link is a clinical decision support system for hospitals. Both are deployed at national scale in Ethiopia and expanding across Sub-Saharan Africa.
We're a 15-person team based in Addis Ababa. We're funded by the Gates Foundation. We move quietly and ship. We believe in writing things down, talking to users, and making decisions with authors, not committees.
More about Opian