Description
IFC — a member of the World Bank Group — is the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets. We work in more than 100 countries, using our capital, expertise, and influence to create markets and opportunities in developing countries. In fiscal year 2023, IFC committed a record US$43.7 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries, leveraging the power of the private sector to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity as economies grapple with the impacts of global compounding crises. For more information, visit http://www.ifc.org.
The ESG Sustainability Advice and Solutions Department (CEG) is IFC’s center of excellence in the area of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) and offers a range of expertise to help IFC’s Investment and Advisory clients identify and solve complex ESG risk-related challenges, and to find value-added opportunities in their business operations. More details can be found at http://www.ifc.org/sustainability.
CEG has a long history of innovation centered on integrating ESG considerations into emerging markets. A dedicated Innovation and Data Science function within the Department has been mandated to serve as a learning, technology exploration, experimentation, and knowledge hub to explore, test, and understand emerging technologies, using design thinking and lean-agile principles to enable IFC to fully harness the Digital Age and achieve its mission.
CEG is building an Artificial Intelligence-powered platform known as Machine Learning ESG Analyst (MALENA) to create ESG risk and impact assessment capacity at scale. More details can be found on the MALENA Page.
The purpose of this Terms of Reference is to hire an extended-term consultant (ETC) to support the MALENA team and the CEG Data Science work program in building version 2.0 based Machine Learning/Deep Learning models, emergent use cases such as Generative AI and creating real-time inference pipelines for beta testers.
The detailed roles and responsibilities are listed below.
Roles and Responsibilities:
• Report to CEG Innovation Lead.
• Work independently in coordination with the CEG Lead Data Scientist
• Work with ESG stakeholders to understand complex business problems and connect those problems with solvable Data Science solutions.
• Audit the different text data assets of the Department and determine how to analyze these data assets for insights.
• Clean and prepare text data to enable Natural Language understanding.
• Prepare high-quality training data with appropriate coverage of the ESG business domain.
• Advise and apply different natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze unstructured data, including information retrieval, questions-answering, and text generation within the purview of IFC’s ESG business domain.
• Work independently to build ingestion processes to prepare, extract, and annotate a variety of unstructured data sources (social media, news, internal/external documents, images, video, voice, emails, financial data, and operational data).
• Build data automation and integration solutions to ease business problem-solving and enable data sources connections and data quality assurance.
• Leverage a variety of tools and approaches to solve complex business objectives, from statistical NLP, information retrieval/extraction, Machine Learning/Deep Learning, Large Language Modelling, Machine Translation, and semantic search.
• Advise on automated ways to label unstructured data from various data sources.
• Experiment with multiple machine learning and large language models (LLMs) and choose the optimal model for training or fine-tuning.
• Follow industry trends in the data science and the AI domain and execute proof of concepts with advanced techniques.
• Have familiarity with working using a lean agile team framework with teams that deliver business value incrementally.
Selection Criteria
World Bank Group Core Competencies
We are proud to be an equal opportunity and inclusive employer with a dedicated and committed workforce, and do not discriminate based on gender, gender identity, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability.
Learn more about working at the World Bank and IFC, including our values and inspiring stories.
Note: The selected candidate will be offered a one-year appointment, renewable at the discretion of the World Bank Group, and subject to a lifetime maximum ET appointment of three years. If an ET appointment ends before a full year, it is considered as a full year toward the lifetime maximum. Former and current ET staff who have completed all or any portion of their third-year ET appointment are not eligible for future ET appointments.