Junior Data Engineer

Organizational Setting

The Office of Emergencies and Resilience (OER) is responsible for ensuring FAO's efforts to support countries and partners in preparing for and effectively responding to food and agricultural threats and crises. It is responsible for coordinating the development and maintenance of corporate tools and standards to enable Decentralized Offices to assist Members to prepare for, and respond to emergencies. OER ensures humanitarian policy coordination and knowledge, liaison with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee as well as with humanitarian resource partners, co-leadership with World Food Programme of the global Food Security Cluster, organizational preparedness, surge capacity and response to large-scale emergencies. OER supports food and nutrition security assessment and early warning activities related to emergency and humanitarian analysis and responses. OER plays a major role in the development and leadership of the Organization's programme to increase the resilience of livelihoods to food and agriculture threats and crises.

Reporting Lines

The Junior Data Engineer reports to the Senior Technical Officer, OER.

Technical Focus

Under the overall guidance of the OER Senior Technical Officer and the OER Needs Assessment Team Leader, and under the direct technical supervision of the OER Data Manager, the Junior Data Engineer will manipulate the datasets and prepare them for the visualization on the dashboards. In addition, he/she will support the different data workflows for the COVID-19 data facility, covering the various phases, including acquisition, quality control, cleaning, analysis, visualization, storage and sharing.

Tasks and responsibilities

The Junior Data Engineer will:

• Support the implementation of data pipelines for the COVID-19 data facility and geospatial Hub and collaborate on the development of the geospatial Hub and related ESRI Apps;
• Support the timely processing of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data, including data workflows harmonization and standardization among datasets coming from different countries or data collection rounds;
• Restructure datasets and develop and implement scripts to transform data into the appropriate format in order to feed in the Covid-19 data facility;
• Create and maintain a GIS reference of administrative boundaries for the countries involved in the monitoring project;
• Create and maintain metadata for all datasets derived from surveys (both microdata and aggregated layers);
• Develop, construct, test and maintain data architectures and align it with business requirements;
• Support the implementation of data visualization solutions;
• Identify data-related tasks that can be automated and develop appropriate procedure;
• Perform other related duties, as requested.

CANDIDATES WILL BE ASSESSED AGAINST THE FOLLOWING

Minimum Requirements

• University degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, GIS & Remote Sensing, Statistics, or related field;
• At least 1 year of experience in data management applied to the humanitarian and development context or socioeconomic research;
• Language requirements for Consultants: Working knowledge of English and limited knowledge of one of the other languages of the Organization (French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese or Russian);
• Language requirements for PSAs: Working knowledge of English.

FAO Core Competencies

• Results Focus
• Teamwork
• Communication
• Building Effective Relationships
• Knowledge Sharing and Continuous Improvement

Technical/Functional Skills

• Proficient in R or Python with working knowledge of data visualization options such as interactive dashboards (ESRI Operational Dashboards, Tableau, Power BI);
• Familiarity with the management of ArcGIS Online content and the creation of maps, dashboards, infographics, hubs using ESRI Technology;
• Ability to manage large datasets from different sources and of a different nature;
• Familiarity and interest in socioeconomic surveys in developing countries;
• Ability to work under pressure and adapt to an evolving and complex humanitarian context and within multidisciplinary and different cultural background teams;
• Effective skills to structure, develop and run a multidimensional system;
• Ability to demonstrate creativity while complying with internal standard procedures and practices;
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written;
• Ability to communicate with technical and non-technical people;
• Effective team leadership and decision making skills with strong individual planning capacity;
• Knowledge of humanitarian principles.