Data Engineer
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.
Job Title: Data Engineer
Type of Contract: Regular Consultant level I
Division: CBT / Cash-Based Transfers Division
Duty Station (City, Country): Munich, Germany
Duration: 11 months
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food and cash assistance to change lives and empower people to meet their essential needs. WFP does this both through direct programming as well as by supporting governments on their national pathways toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in partnership with multiple stakeholders. WFP is the largest cash actor in the humanitarian community: WFP transferred over US$3.3 billion to 56 million people across 72 countries in 2022.
When WFP sends people money, we give them the flexibility to choose what they need and when they need it. People spend most of the money WFP sends them on food, but they also can use it to pay medical bills, rent or school fees. Sending people money means that they don’t need to make impossible trade-offs, like deciding to eat less so that they can keep all their children in school.
The Cash-Based Transfer (CBT) Division in HQ has been tasked with leading on WFP’s corporate systems and services for WFP’s in-kind and CBT programmes. CBT intends to support WFP Country Offices to deliver assistance to beneficiaries through a variety of digital platforms and service providers. WFP works in partnership with several commercial Financial Service Providers (FSPs), including banks, micro-finance institutions, mobile money operators and money transfer agents, in addition to using WFP’s own delivery platform, SCOPE.
One of WFP’s corporate objectives is to increasingly deliver assistance, either cash-based transfer (CBT) or in-kind, through digital means, and register beneficiaries digitally, in order to achieve greater efficiencies and provide greater accountability and traceability of assistance delivered.
Therefore, WFP seeks to build its corporate capacity to centrally receive, store, process and analyse digital operational data for the purpose of promoting accountability, controls and efficiencies as part of cash-based transfer. There is also the opportunity to better inform WFP’s programme design through the analysis of digital data emanating from operations.
Job Purpose:
Reporting to the delivery manager of the CDS team, this role is integrated in the CDS implementation and maintenance support team (made up of data analysts and engineers). The development team implements Data Assurance custom solutions for Country Offices around the world. The role is key to ensuring developed solutions answer users needs and also enforce security, operability, scalability and maintainability required by high standard systems. The role also makes the link between the need expressed by the end-user and the core infrastructure team provided by an external provider. Considering the scope of the agency and the unit, the ideal candidate has strong technical capacities, able to work good in teams, resilient mindset, and strong communicator.
KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
Requirement analysis and solution implementation
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- The candidate will need to perform user requirements critical analysis to identify and prioritise the key business needs. The candidate will then, along with the lead analyst, assess the best technical solution design based on available technology and overall programme needs to ensure business needs are addressed in terms of scope, timeliness, reliability, security, operability, maintainability, and costs.
- The candidate shall then implement or configure the infrastructure aspect of the solution and integrate analyst-developed processors into the infrastructure with the goal of ensuring WFP IT (TEC) guidelines and best practices are enforced, and solutions’ operations can be monitored and controlled
- The successful candidate will interact with the engineer core team for usage and implementation of core infrastructure functions to ensure proper requirement definition and ensure core functions can be used and operated by the development team
Technical solution operational verification and documentation
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- The candidate shall ensure the overall solutions operability and maintainability through implementations verifications and document discrepancies and needs for improvements with the goal of tracking solutions technical status and control developments and ensure more efficient and timely maintenance
- The engineer (along with analysts) shall write and verify solutions documentation (user manual, maintenance documentation, …) and support their improvements to support the solutions’ development and maintenance lifecycles
- The engineer will perform solutions testing to control requirements (users, guidelines, operational…) are met and solutions are fit for purposes
- The candidate will participate to operations transfer-to-operations meetings to officially deliver the solution to the operations team with the goal of ensuring deliverable completeness
Solution maintenance support
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- Once in operations, the candidate shall perform solutions’ issues assessment (2nd line support – problem management) along with analysts to ensure solution fixing will address long term functions and users’ needs
- The candidate responsibilities also includes designing, implementing, testing and documenting fixes to repristinate nominal functionalities and minimise downtime for users
- Support Cash Data Service Support team in communicating with end-users on issue fix to improve end-users satisfaction and embed a continuous feedback loop
Support service activities
- The candidate will support monthly and quarterly reporting on the service performances to provide inputs to the service management to support the necessary controls of the overall operations
- The engineer will support requirement definition and validation of core infrastructure to ensure the development team has the relevant tools to perform their activities.
- As the CDS has various counterparts (e.g. TEC, technical auditors…), the candidate will support stakeholder communication (through writing documentation, participating to meetings, drafting of reports, gathering of technical evidence) to support the service formal interactions
QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:
Education:
A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science or Economics. ITIL certification would be an asset.
Experience:
Experience (at least 3 years) working with large data sets, engineering and operating data management solutions for businesses in international environment. Has experience with working in a multi-cultural environment and/or international organization.
Nice to have: IT quality assurance, service operations
Knowledge and Skills:
- Familiarity with data warehousing and business intelligence concepts.
- Familiarity with cloud-infrastructures, preferably AWS
- Advanced SQL skills along with Jupiter Notebook, dbt, lambda, Python/pandas, Tableau dashboards
- Ability to capture requirements, translate them into insights and adapt writing style to a variety of audiences
- Be service-oriented, coordinating multiple activities for both external and internal stakeholders
- Pay excellent attention to detail and understand the implications and nuances of communications strategies and formats;
- Ability to plan and organize work with reasonable supervision;
Language:
Fluency (level C) in English with an intermediate knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) or Portuguese (one of WFP’s working languages) is desirable.
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: 02 August 2023
Ref.: VA No. 828473
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.
WFP is committed to an accessible, inclusive recruitment process. Please contact us at global.inclusion@wfp.org to advise us of any disability related reasonable
accommodation or accessibility requests you may have. A member of the reasonable accommodation team will contact you to confidentially discuss your needs
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.
