Consultant Software Alignment - Emergency Operations CST I (Remote)

WFP celebrates and embraces diversity. It is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all its employees and encourages qualified candidates to apply irrespective of race, color, national origin, ethnic or social background, genetic information, gender, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, religion or belief, HIV status, physical or mental disability.****Terms and Conditions

JOB TITLE:

Consultant Software Alignment – Emergency Operations

TYPE OF CONTRACT:

Consultancy Level I

UNIT/DIVISION:

Global Surge Coordination Unit (GSCU)/Emergency Operations Division (EME)

DUTY STATION (City, Country):

Remote

DURATION:

11 months

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the leading humanitarian organization saving lives and changing lives, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.

The Emergency Operations Division (EME) supports WFP’s Regional Bureaus (RBs), Country Offices (COs) and partners to prepare and respond to current and future emergencies in a rapidly changing humanitarian environment. EME provides a field-focused, service oriented, steering and convening role focusing on forward-looking preparedness and support to emergencies to ensure a swift, coordinated, and integrated response. In particular, the ability to timely deploy surge staff with the required operational experience and technical skills remains a critical factor for effective emergency response.

The Global Surge Coordination Unit (GSCU) within EME identifies, upskills and dispatches emergency response staff in support of life-saving operations where required. It is responsible for managing the process of identifying and dispatching personnel in response to staffing requests, leveraging a pool of qualified candidates. The GSCU also maintains Standby Partnerships with governments and NGOs to field technical experts when needed. It also holds the Surge Learning team which capacitates staff through a curated learning journey that ensures those deployed have the right skills to make an impact.

The GSCU is recruiting a System Engineer to develop the Food Force Video Game (FFVG) ensuring it is performing as its best. In addition, the role will also involve identifying and resolving any issues as quickly as possible. 13 years since the last iteration of Food Force, with the evolving complexity of crises, the Food Force video game is undergoing a significant revamp. The game will guide players through WFP’s emergency response operations and show how the organization uses food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters, and the impact of climate change. As a highly engaging tool to inspire WFP staff and educate the wider public on the work of the world’s largest humanitarian organization, this is a valued asset that will be enhanced with the latest developments in gaming. The selected candidate, amongst other things, will manage the coordination with vendors and stakeholders for the Game. The consultant will report to the Business Transformation Officer and work closely with colleagues in the digitalization team, GSCU and other colleagues in the organization to collaboratively work towards common goals.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Determine products strategy for delivery, rollouts and long-term road mapping for the Food Force Video Game ensuring key performance indicators are set to monitor progress and compliance with WFP standards and regularly report on software engineering components and identify any issue to take corrective action as needed. This involves working with various tools and technologies, such as Slack, Azure, or any other relevant tools.
• Turn the proof of concept of the product into a robust experience that you can impact the direction ensuring technical support through troubleshooting problems during the development of the Food Force Video Game and continuous analysis and performing evaluation to identify areas of improvement and optimization
• Build online features of the Food Force Video Game including account services, parties, matchmaking, statistics records and fullstack solutions to implement an end-user friendly software that easily interact with other WFP corporate systems and be easily used externally
• Analyze feature requests for viability, design, completeness, risks of digitalized GSCU solutions and Food Force Video Game
• Execute ideation and visual design of the game content, while working side-by-side with the different functional teams to bring the concept to life
• Contribute innovative ideas and original assets for prototyping and actual development
• Lead F2P mobile anime games, from the pre-production through production phases
• Develop and manage programming task schedule tests and updates and coordinate with production team
• Build the back-end layer for the system and develop Restful APIs for the front-end
• Guide the development testers to ensure good testing, both automated and by hand for overall GSCU digitalized solutions leading the capacity planning and forecasting to ensure that game servers and other components of the game architecture can handle expected levels of traffic
• Manage websites tracking and tagging, optimizing website flows for each user journey, troubleshooting technical issues or any problems that arise during the development and testing phases of Food Force Video Game, reviewing codes and checking code quality
• Develop and maintain build pipelines and release pipeline in Azure DevOps for different environments (staging, QA, training, production)
• Implement automated alert and notification system to provide timely notification when performance issues occur in the game including alert triggered when specific performance thresholds are exceeded as well as notification to user for stakeholders to know specific issue
• Serves as the glue between the GSCU and the internal/external stakeholders (external vendor, product owner, marketing etc) to ensure right understanding of the business requirements and right implementation of the digitalized solutions according to WFP TEC rules and architecture standards being inclusive and integrated with other corporate digitalized platforms to ensure that all aspects of Food Force Video Game are working together seamlessly
• Create and maintain monitoring dashboards providing real-time visibility into the status and performance of the game using data visualization tools such as Tableau, Power Bi or other tools.
• Provide regular updates and reports on the status of the Food Force Video Game, including any issues that arise
• Create and maintain documentation on softwires features and monitoring processes and procedures
• Provide any other support as requested.

KEY DELIVERABLES:

• Successful delivery of the revamped Food Force Video Game.
• High-quality and innovative architecture designs for GSCU digitalized solutions
• Full project documentation for system audits.
• Regular progress reporting with set Key Performance Indicators for digitalized projects success and compliance
• Successful organized and facilitated workshops with internal and external stakeholders including ‘after workshop’ reports that highlight conclusions.
• Delivery of fully Back - Front-end code compliant with WFP’s standards and corporate guidance.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:

Education:

Advanced university degree in Information Technology, Data Science, Business Administration/Management, Mathematics, Performance Management, or related field. First University degree with additional years of related work experience and/or trainings/courses may be considered.

Experience:

At least 4 years of progressive professional experience software development experience developing software utilizing various coding languages including Java, C++, PHP and game development & more

Knowledge & Skills:

• Web Application Development Experience in PHP including MVC framework (Laravel), Restful APIs, JavaScript, CSS, XML, JSON Technologies

  • Development within an Agile product development methodology
  • Experience with Java server-side programing & game development
  • Good knowledge of MySQL and Oracle Databases (Procedures, Data modelling)
  • Experience with React.js and building single page applications considered a plus.
  • Experience configuring/administrating application servers such as Apache and Tomcat considered a plus
  • Experience with Linux OS and shell scripting
  • Experience with CI/CD pipeline Azure DevOps.
  • Experience through the different stages of Software Development Life Cycle
  • Project management skills
  • Excellent and demonstrated capability to work collaboratively within a team
  • Proficiency in Web Graphic User Interface (GUI) design and development
  • Experience with all aspects of game artwork – concept, 2D, 3D, Animation, UI, and visual effects
  • Experience working with Blockchain, NFT, and/or Cryptocurrency technologies
  • Experience with eCommerce, API Integrations, and/or Infrastructure oriented products

  Languages:

  Fluency (level C) in English language. Intermediate knowledge (level B) of a second official UN language: Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, and/or WFP’s working language, Portuguese.

Terms and Conditions

WFP offers a competitive compensation package which will be determined by the contract type and selected candidate’s qualifications and experience.

Please visit the following websites for detailed information on working with WFP.

http://www.wfp.org Click on: “Our work” and “Countries” to learn more about WFP’s operations.

Deadline for applications: 19th March 2023

Ref.: VA No. 514771

All employment decisions are made on the basis of organizational needs, job requirements, merit, and individual qualifications. WFP is committed to providing an inclusive work environment free of sexual exploitation and abuse, all forms of discrimination, any kind of harassment, sexual harassment, and abuse of authority. Therefore, all selected candidates will undergo rigorous reference and background checks.

No appointment under any kind of contract will be offered to members of the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), FAO Finance Committee, WFP External Auditor, WFP Audit Committee, Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) and other similar bodies within the United Nations system with oversight responsibilities over WFP, both during their service and within three years of ceasing that service.