Consultancy: DevOps Engineer, ICTD Digital Core, Valencia, Spain, 1 year (remote)

Consultant Programme & Policy IT & Telecom Innovation

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UNICEF works in some of the world's toughest places, to reach the world's most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, a connected world.

The fundamental mission of UNICEF is to promote the rights of every child, everywhere, in everything the organization does — in programs, in advocacy and in operations. The equity strategy, emphasizing the most disadvantaged and excluded children and families, translates this commitment to children’s rights into action. For UNICEF, equity means that all children have an opportunity to survive, develop and reach their full potential, without discrimination, bias or favoritism. To the degree that any child has an unequal chance in life — in its social, political, economic, civic and cultural dimensions — her or his rights are violated. There is growing evidence that investing in the health, education and protection of a society’s most disadvantaged citizens — addressing inequity — not only will give all children the opportunity to fulfill their potential but also will lead to sustained growth and stability of countries. This is why the focus on equity is so vital. It accelerates progress towards realizing the human rights of all children, which is the universal mandate of UNICEF, as outlined by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, while also supporting the equitable development of nations.

About Giga

Launched in 2019 as a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet.

According to the international Telecommunication Union (ITU), nearly 3.7 billion people remain unconnected from the internet, and by extension, unconnected to digital products and services that could dramatically improve their lives. Approximately 29% of 18–24-year-olds, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, do not have digital access (~360m people) and thereby lack access to the same information, opportunity and choice as their more-connected peers. Unless things change, a big part of this rapidly growing group of young people is in danger of being left behind, excluded from the modern digital world.

Giga combines UNICEF’s focus on children and education with ITU’s experience in connectivity policy, to ensure that every school in the world has access to the internet – and every young person has access to information, opportunity, and choice. In addition to connecting t more than 1 billion young people that Giga is aiming to serve through their schools, last mile infrastructure can also be used to allow for other public (and private) growth of internet access.

Giga works with multiple partners, country offices, vendors and collaborators to build and run a suite of technology products and services. Our working environment demands that our solutions and platforms facilitate cross-organization tech collaborations. The DevOps Engineer will work closely with other engineers in the Applications Platforms Unit and Cybersecurity operations teams to build and provision Giga with application platforms that continuously deliver the required capabilities, functionality, and secure operations. You will be a part of a passionate team of technologists creating new open-source solutions that drive the innovation we need to connect every school to the Internet, and every young person to information, opportunity, and choice.

Some of Giga’s data, ML and software projects include Project Connect, Daily Check App, Gigacounts, Connectivity Credits, the DataOps platform and machine learning models for feature extraction. Giga uses Azure to host its applications and data and prioritizes open-source technologies and frameworks.

Purpose of Activity/Assignment:

As part of an exciting transformation to improve Giga’s technology operations and systems, we are seeking a skilled DevOps Engineer with experience building and supporting highly secure cloud application platforms to support our critical workloads at scale. The DevOps Engineer will set up and maintain Giga’s DevOps infrastructure and will provide DevOps support to Giga’s technology team, ensuring that they are able to deliver their products and services in a timely, secure and cost-effective manner and in compliance with UNICEF/ICTD standards and best practices. You will help us streamline the software development lifecycle to improve vendor and developer productivity, delivery speed, and code quality in support of existing and upcoming products.

How can you make a difference?

This consultancy is under the supervision of the ICTD Manager, Application Platforms (APS) in the Platforms and Services Delivery Section of the ICT Division, and will be responsible for the management of technology vendors, consultants and staff associated with Office of Innovation (OoI) Giga projects as part of the DevOps engineering work.

Scope of Work:

The DevOps engineer will:

• Build and maintain the CI/CD pipelines to improve developer productivity, agility, and code quality.

• Streamline the software development lifecycle by identifying and documenting pain points and productivity barriers and determining ways to resolve them.

• Collaborate closely with vendor development teams and OoI/Giga staff to understand their current build and release processes and lead the implementation of improvement recommendations.

• Support in setting up and managing access to new development, staging and production environments for UNICEF Giga’s engineering teams, partners and vendors

• Support OoI/Giga in setting up open-source tools like Datahub, Apache Airflow, Deltalake, Apache Nifi etc.

• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders, including development, operations, quality assurance and security, to better optimize flow.

• Develop and continuously improve automation solutions to enable teams to build and deploy code efficiently and consistently.

• Build automated testing to reduce manual effort and improve product quality.

• Ensure that systems meet business and customer needs for reliability and availability.

• Monitor and manage application performance and service quality, including initial troubleshooting, identification of root cases and issue resolution.

• Set up and manage cost and utilization monitoring tools for platforms linked to Giga.

• Respond to and resolve incidents related to infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, and coordinating with relevant teams to ensure timely resolution and minimal impact on business operations.

• Capture best practices, procedures, and lessons learned, and sharing knowledge with ICTD and OoI/Giga team members to foster a culture of learning and knowledge sharing.

• Prepare and present design and implementation documentation to multiple stakeholders.

• Promote DevOps principles and culture across the OoI/Giga team.

• In collaboration with other APS Unit engineers, review and propose solution approach ideas for new business cases by selecting the best options and providing strategic direction in the architecture, design, and integration of platform services.

• The incumbent recommends and in collaboration with other engineers, conducts proofs of concept in new application platform and cloud technologies and services.

• Propose new software to be purchased or consumed as a service and demonstrates value for money in acquisitions and technology decisions.

• Recommends enhancements to be applied based upon evaluation of costs and benefits.

Work Assignment Overview

Work Assignments Overview

Deliverables/Outputs

Delivery deadline

(timelines are anticipated and subject to change)

Onboarding, understanding and documenting Giga’s current tech stack

• Documentation containing an assessment and mapping of Giga’s current stack, including identified pain points, productivity barriers, and challenges across its technical development operation

01/08/2023

(1 month from start date)

Solution prototype and roadmap

• Document with the design, rationale, architecture and key considerations of proposed solution to address limitations
• Roadmap for implementing proposed solution

01/09/2023

(1 month)

Set up of key dev environments and implementation of support processes (user policy and ticketing system)

• New dev environment set-up
• Process to onboard engineers and relevant users
• Draft of a user policy for Giga, (which must include UNICEF, ITU and external users)
• Ticketing system to manage and track requests for resources or support from Giga users

01/10/2023

(1 month)

Support to software product team

• Dev and hosting environments, databases and CI/CD set-up for software product team
• Recommendations for managing and scaling products currently in production (Project Connect, Daily Check App)
• Support in deploying and maintaining products in-development (an API ingestion and management system and a school prioritization simulation tool) deployed and maintained

01/12/2023

(2 months)

Support to data and ML team

• Deployment of key DevOps resources identified to efficiently scale the work of the ML team (which may include efficient computing instances, analytics, BI tools, ML model pipeline orchestration tools and custom data application hosting)
• DevOps resources to run ML models to map schools at scale

01/01/2024

(1 month)

Support to DataOps team

• Deployment of open-source tools, like Datahub, Apache Airflow, Deltalake, Apache Nifi etc.
• Support in integrating these data management tools with each other as well as with existing Giga products.

01/03/24

(2 months)

Support to Blockchain team

• Sandbox environments for experiments carried out by the Blockchain team (including but not limited to Gigacounts and NFT 2.0)

01/04/24

(1 month)

Cost and productivity management

• Cost and usage monitoring and alerting system
• Onboarding and offboarding process and associated documentation for users
• Documentation of KPIs to track in these systems to ensure response times are less than 1 working day for any DevOps query through a ticketing system

01/05/24

(1 month)

Documentation, training and handover

• Training materials on DevOps best practices (including but not limited to resource, cost and user management, CI/CD, storing keys, ticketing system, etc)

01/07/24

(2 months)

*Timelines are anticipated and subject to change, deliverables may be re-prioritized and re-ordered as needed by the UNICEF project team based on constraints and other project dependencies.

Duration and Location

This consultancy will be home-based. The selected candidate will be expected to have a minimum of a 4 hour overlap with the working hours in Valencia, Spain. This consultancy is expected to have a maximum duration of 1 year from the start date.

Application Instructions

Applicants are required to submit a financial proposal. Financial proposals should be in US$ and inclusive of all fees to undertake the terms of reference above. Applications submitted without a financial proposal will not be considered.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

• Bachelor of Science is required in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.

• At least 5 years of experience building and managing DevOps platform for a software or data product company is required.

• At least 3 years of experience building and operating DevOps for users across multiple organizations working on highly collaborative projects is required.

• At least 3 years of experience in building and managing fully on-cloud and secure systems is required.

• Hands-on experience with DevOps principles and practices such as Everything-as-a-code, IaC, CI/CD, proactive monitoring and testing, automation, automated testing and observability is required.

• Strong understanding of cybersecurity principles and technologies and how they apply to the Microsoft Cloud Ecosystem is required.

• Experience with scripting and automation for managing Infrastructure and Platform deployments (IaC, Powershell, Azure CLI, Git, Terraform, Azure Resource Manager, etc) is required.

• Proficiency in one or more of the following coding languages: JavaScript, C++, Python / Django, Java is required.

• Experience designing landing zones in Azure and managing workloads at scale with mixed responsivity models (central, shared and delegated) is required.

• Hands-on-experience with DevOps tools (particularly Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines) is required.

• Microsoft Azure development platform including hands on service management experience for Microsoft Entra is required.

• Track record of open-source contributions and a good understanding of open-source DevOps tools and ecosystem is required.

• Familiarity working with Agile methodologies is required.

• Familiarity working with project and product management software (Jira, Kanban, Clickup, etc.) is required.

• Experience working with cross-functional development teams is required.

• Previous experience with Amazon Web Service is required.

• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability.

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Individuals engaged under a consultancy will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts. UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

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Added 11 months ago - Updated 10 months ago - Source: unicef.org