Consultancy - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer, Office of Innovation/Giga, 12 months, REMOTE, 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

• Work closely with the Product Manager and the Mapping & Tech Lead, to lead the development of the Project Connect, Daily Check App and an open-source platform to map real-time school connectivity globally.
• Coordinate the work of vendors and other software partners that are supporting us to build new products, API and distributed infrastructures worldwide.
• Build new prototypes and tools that support the current Giga project, as well as scale features in existing ones.
• Support and maintain, including documentation, software and products related to Giga
• Work closely with other parts of the team (i.e., blockchain team) to explore collaboration and integration.
• As a Senior technical member, you will contribute to product strategy and help develop the engineering team.

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.

Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality.

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%.

You cannot fix a problem unless you can see it, so the first step is to map schools and their connectivity levels. Giga uses machine learning to scan satellite images and identify schools. These are then marked by coloured dots on an open-source map: green where there is good connectivity (over 5mb/s); amber where it is limited; and red where there is no connectivity at all.

Just as building railroads allowed previously isolated towns to flourish, providing good quality Internet access will allow communities to participate in the digital economy for the first time. But Giga’s work in laying the tracks for connectivity is only one part of a wider effort to bridge the digital divide. UNICEF’s Reimagine Education initiative brings all of this work together and has set the goal of connecting every child and young person – some 3.5 billion - to world-class digital learning solutions by 2030. In addition to Giga, it includes components focusing on the affordability of data and content, access to devices, teacher certification and the engagement of young people. Along with ITU’s digital skills programme and other initiatives, Reimagine Education aims to ensure that, once connected, young people are empowered with the tools they need to shape their own futures.

You can read more about Giga’s work at https://giga.global and by following us on twitter @Gigaglobal

How can you make a difference?

We seek a product and data analyst who can work with a diverse, global and interdisciplinary team to help us improve and scale our products and processes through their critical data analysis. You´d be the caretaker of Giga´s main datasets, the one taking care of their quality and integrity. This would mean creating automated reports and alerting systems, using existing open-source tools to analyze different datasets, setting and managing data quality benchmarks, and supporting the engineering team with writing high quality data pipelines.

You will:

• Create automated reports to track and analyze Giga’s progress in mapping schools, their connectivity and the infrastructure available to them.
• Analyze real-time school internet Quality of Service (QoS) data from different sources, including Internet Service Provider (ISP) data through APIs as well as data obtained directly from schools through Giga’s desktop application and browser extension (www.projectconnect.world).
• Setup product and user analytics and suggest product and process improvements and contribute directly to the efforts in mapping schools and their connectivity across the globe.
• Be the data quality expert within the team and support data engineers to write robust data quality checks across data pipelines and workflows.
• Lead the process of data documentation and metadata management within the data and tech team.
• Contribute to building data-driven culture across the team by supporting them with efforts like defining and tracking KPIs, funneling analysis of their processes and templatizing data queries.

Please click TOR - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer.pdf to access the full TOR and related information.

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

• Advanced University degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
• A minimum of eight (8) years of relevant professional experience in full-stack software development
• Advanced experience in building software prototypes and extensible API
• Experience in ETL implementation for structured/unstructured data source.
• Experience in interacting with users and collecting user feedback on prototypes
• Familiarity with Agile development environments and practices
• Advanced knowledge in cloud services: Azure, AWS, GCP and DevOps
• Advanced knowledge of JavaScript front-end frameworks (React / Redux, Angular, etc.)
• Languages: Node.js, ruby, python, C#, bash
• Experience in development of Headless CMS
• Advanced knowledge of native desktop application development technologies.
• Geospatial DBs, libraries and data structures
• SQL and NoSQL database systems
• Experience with git, pull requests, and continuous integration and deployment
• Ability to learn other coding languages as needed
• Open-source community active
• Knowledge of blockchain technologies is an asset
• Developing country work experience 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

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.