Consultancy - Senior Data Engineer, Office of Innovation/Giga, 12 months, Remote - Barcelona, REQ

Contract

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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, innovate...

Giga's Background

Giga is a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, with a specific goal to connect every school to reliable internet, and every young person to information, opportunity and choice. To achieve this goal, we have been mapping schools' geolocations and their real-time internet quality, demographics and potential internet infrastructure around them across the globe. We have been doing this through products like Project Connect, Daily Check app, Machine learning for school detection and multiple data collaborations.

The Senior Software Engineer will work with a multidisciplinary team to lead the development of these diverse range of products that will help us achieve the ambitious goal of connecting every school, and every community 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 the 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.

Purpose of the appointment/Key activities

• Build and manage a technically robust, resilient and scalable DataOps platform - a set of synced tools to maintain sanity and consistency across the entire data lifecycle of ingestion, transformation, storage, access and sharing in an automated manner.
• Build the master data management system for Giga’s open school data map and APIs which will serve as the world’s source of truth for school geolocations, connectivity and infrastructure data.
• Build key data pipelines and workflows prototypes for Giga’s flagship products like the DataOps platform and ML model for school detection.
• Build data workflows and stack for Internet Quality of Service (QoS) data ingestion
• Build proof of concept products or mockups for product market testing.
• Guide and support vendors and partners in building products.
• Set up the data engineering culture and best practices and champion their adoption at the same time.
• As a Senior technical member, you will contribute to product strategy and help mentor and develop technical and data teams.

Please click TOR - Senior Data Engineer.pdf to access the full TOR and related information.

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

• University degree in Computer Science or similar field.
• At least five years of relevant work experience in building and managing open-source data products
• Deep understanding & expertise in building and managing DataOps Platforms - data pipelines, ingestion, storage, data processing, and data governance.
• Experience with open-source data engineering and governance technologies like Airflow or any other major orchestration tool, Python, Apache Atlas or DataHub, Apache Superset, Kubernetes clusters, Great Expectations package.
• Strong knowledge of the ML lifecycle and MLOps best practices.
• Experience on functional and technical requirements gathering
• Experience using agile methodology and use of software ticketing systems (Jira, Github)
• Experience with git-based repositories
• Experience implementing automated testing (QA) and continuous integration/ continuous deployment with systems
• Excellent leadership skills to mentor engineers.
• Active open-source contributions and have a good understanding of open-source DataOps tools & ecosystem.
• Experience with JavaScript and JS frameworks is a plus.
• Work experience in developing countries and/or familiarity with emergency conditions is considered an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

Payment details and further considerations

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant. • Consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance • Consultant is responsible to arrange his/her own travel, including visa

Travel : The consultant will be expected to travel to Barcelona, Spain once. The duration of that stay will be 5 business days.

Duty Station : Remote / Barcelona, Spain

Duration: 12 months

Insurance:

UNICEF will not be responsible for costs arising from accidents and/or illness incurred during the consultant’s service. Therefore, the selected candidate must provide proof of enrollment in a health/accident plan prior to starting his/her work.

How to apply:

• Interested applicant is required to submit a financial proposal with all-inclusive fee. Please complete your profile in UNICEF's e-Recruitment system. • Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class), daily subsistence allowance (limited to UN official rates), and other estimated costs such as visa and travel/health insurance. Please indicate your ability, availability and financial proposal (in US$) to undertake the terms of reference above. • Applications submitted without a financial proposal will not be considered.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

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

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:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract 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.