Individual Giving Data Engineer

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS

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, colour, national origin, ethnic or social background, genetic information, gender, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, religion or belief, HIV status or disability.

ABOUT WFP

The World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity, for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

At WFP, people are at the heart of everything we do and the vision of the future WFP workforce is one of diverse, committed, skilled, and high performing teams, selected on merit, operating in a healthy and inclusive work environment, living WFP's values (Integrity, Collaboration, Commitment, Humanity, and Inclusion) and working with partners to save and change the lives of those WFP serves.

To learn more about WFP, visit our website: https://www.wfp.org and follow us on social media to keep up with our latest news: YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok.

WHY JOIN WFP? 

• WFP is a 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

• WFP offers a highly inclusive, diverse, and multicultural working environment.

• WFP invests in the personal & professional development of its employees through a range of training, accreditation, coaching, mentorship, and other programs as well as through internal mobility opportunities.

• A career path in WFP provides an exciting opportunity to work across the various country, regional and global offices around the world, and with passionate colleagues who work tirelessly to ensure that effective humanitarian assistance reaches millions of people across the globe.

• We offer an attractive compensation package (please refer to the Terms and Conditions section of this vacancy announcement).

POSITION TITLE: Individual Giving Data Engineer
TYPE OF CONTRACT: Regular Consultant
ORG UNIT: PSP - Private Sector Partnerships
DUTY STATION: Fully Remote - administrative duty station is Rome, HQ
DURATION: 11 months
LINE MANGER/SUPERVISOR: Head of IG Tech & Ops

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the world’s largest humanitarian agency working to create a world with zero hunger. WFP and its partners believe that no child should go to bed hungry and that individual and collective wellbeing can only be achieved if all children, women and men get the nutritious food they need to lead healthy, dignified lives. Each year, WFP assists 90 million people in 83 countries. Every day, some 5,600 WFP-chartered trucks are on the road, 92 planes are in the air and 20 ships are at sea. These numbers speak to WFP’s unparalleled reputation as an emergency responder, one that is often the first on the scene in the most difficult environments. WFP also works with partners to strengthen the resilience of communities most vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition through long-term development programmes aimed at boosting food security, local economies, education, employment and gender equality. While hunger and malnutrition are the world’s largest solvable issues, the needs are still immense and growing. 821 million people in the world suffer from chronic hunger.

The Private Partnerships Division (PSP) is responsible for working with the private sector to achieve greater impact in WFP’s work. PSP has embarked on an exceptionally ambitious new strategy to raise an additional one 1.3 dollars for hungry or malnourished people in the next five years and to expand the contribution to WFP from the business sector through effective and sustainable long-term partnerships as well as from private individual supporters around the world. This includes securing new high impact technical partnerships, signing significant new corporate deals and growing existing relationships as well as building a base of one million individual supporters.

INDIVIDUAL FUNDRAISING

WFP operates one of the fastest-growing global individual fundraising programmes in the humanitarian sector. Initially launched as a lean, digital-focused initiative, the programme has evolved into a major strategic driver of income growth, with an ambition to raise USD 1.3 billion annually by 2030. The programme has transitioned from a purely digital model to a digital-first, multi-channel approach. While the centralised global team continues to acquire supporters through core digital channels (Meta and Search), it is rapidly scaling additional acquisition channels such as Face-to-Face, Direct TV, Telemarketing, and Direct Mail. This diversification is essential to sustaining growth and strengthening donor lifetime value, but it also introduces increased operational, regulatory, and contractual complexity.

At the same time, the programme is shifting from a largely Western-market focus to a more g-local model. Now operating in seven languages, it enables more locally relevant engagement and is expanding into high-potential strategic markets including Korea, China, Italy, and the Middle East. This expansion requires robust governance frameworks, strong understanding of fundraising regulations, and effective management of contracts with external partners and vendors.

Supporter engagement is delivered through an integrated, multi-channel loyalty ecosystem—including email, SMS, WhatsApp, outbound telephony, and Meta—ensuring a high-quality donor experience that drives long-term engagement and impact.

In this context of rapid growth and increasing complexity, and as part of a broader team restructuring, a new Strategic Operations sub-team is being established to strengthen governance, contractual, and compliance oversight across Individual Giving (IG) and ShareTheMeal (STM). The team will play a critical role in enabling sustainable fundraising expansion while ensuring compliance, consistency, and organizational integrity.
 

PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT 

The Data Engineer will report to the IG Tech & Ops Lead and will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the data platforms, cloud infrastructure, and integrations that support WFP's global individual giving programme. The role will support the evolution of WFP's fundraising data capabilities through the development of pipelines, integrations, cloud-native services, and other technical solutions across an expanding technical ecosystem.

The role will include hands-on delivery of data engineering processes, development of new capabilities including cloud-native integrations, tracking infrastructure, and evolution of the data warehouse. The role will also provide resilience and support across existing reporting and analytical capabilities, working collaboratively with the Business Intelligence, Individual Giving, and ShareTheMeal teams.

The Data Engineer will be a core technical contributor to the IG Tech & Ops team, ensuring data quality, pipeline reliability, operational scalability, and the reduction of dependency on external suppliers where in-house capability can be developed.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES

The role is expected to cover the following areas:

Data Strategy & Architecture

• Lead the implementation of IG data strategies – aligning with corporate data strategies and standards - ensuring warehouse evolution, tooling choices, integrations, and data flows are aligned with both technical architecture and fundraising programme needs.

• Review existing data flows across Individual Giving, identify gaps and inefficiencies, and design solutions to meet current and emerging data needs.

• Consult with enterprise architecture team to reduce potential overlaps and opitmize on re-use of existing corporate data assets.

• Align warehouse implementation with the broader IG technical and fundraising architecture, ensuring coherence across systems, teams, and markets.

• Support the evolution of data and integration architectures, identifying opportunities to replace manual processes and low-code solutions - with use of AI, including AI Agents and cloud-native approaches where appropriate.

Data Warehouse, Pipelines & Modellin

• Own and drive the end-to-end implementation of the data warehouse, including physical and logical data modelling, schema design, and layer structuring.

• Build and maintain scalable, well-documented ELT pipelines and ingestion patterns that consolidate data from fundraising platforms, CRM systems, payment processors, marketing channels, and external partners.

• Lead the implementation of new data integrations involving agency feeds, external partners, vendor platforms, and third-party systems, ensuring reliable and standardized movement of data into both warehouse and operational platforms where required.

• Design and implement data transformation pipelines, including attribution of input pipelines that feed into performance measurement and channel reporting models.

• Integrate data from new acquisition channels (e.g., Face-to-Face, Direct Mail, Telemarketing) and new geographic decentralized markets as the programme expands.

• Design and implement technical solutions supporting the synchronization and activation of data across fundraising systems, including CRM platforms, marketing technologies, and emerging acquisition channels.

Data Observability, Quality & Integrity

• Implement comprehensive data observability and integrity checks at the warehouse layer, including automated freshness, completeness, and consistency monitoring with alerting anomalies or failures.

• Own root-cause resolution of warehouse-level data issues, ensuring issues are diagnosed clearly, resolved permanently, and documented to prevent recurrence.

• Prevent recurring manual data fixes and backfills by building robust, self-healing pipelines with proper exception handling and upstream validation.

• Maintain clear data lineage documentation and data dictionaries to support transparency, auditability, and cross-team understanding of data assets.

• Work with Privacy and TEC Information Security teams to ensure all data handling practices comply with WFP policies.

Reporting & Dashboard Development

• Support the development and maintenance of reporting capabilities by providing reliable datasets, reusable data structures, and technically robust foundations for analytical outputs.

• Collaborate closely with Business Intelligence colleagues to ensure reporting solutions remain accurate, scalable, and aligned with agreed business definitions and requirements.

• Develop self-service reporting capabilities where appropriate, enabling fundraising and operational teams to access and explore data with reduced reliance on technical support.

• Provide resilience across critical reporting activities where required, ensuring continuity of operational support and reducing dependency on individual resources.

QA, Testing & Collaboration

• Contribute to the design and maintenance of technical environments required to validate data and integration flows end-to-end, supporting system-level release confidence across the fundraising ecosystem.

• Support QA processes in validating data-related flows, ensuring that testing environments provide the data needed for systems to function correctly end-to-end.

• Ensure that testing coverage provides confidence that data arriving in operational systems (CRM, reporting, payment platforms) is accurate, complete, and correctly structured.

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for data engineering needs across Individual Giving.

• Translate analytical and operational requirements from non-technical fundraising stakeholders into technical specifications, delivering solutions in an agile and iterative manner.

• Support the IG Tech & Ops Lead with ad hoc data analysis and contribute to knowledge-sharing and data literacy across the broader IG and PSP teams.

• Work in coordination and partnership with our IG tech team, Business Intelligence, CRM and other technical teams to ensure coherent delivery of data, integration, and reporting capabilities across the fundraising ecosystem.

Capacity Development and Knowledge Sharing

• Develop internal capability by mentoring colleagues, promoting knowledge sharing, and establishing self-service approaches across data, integration, and reporting functions, reducing dependency on external suppliers over time.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

Education: 

• University degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Information Systems, or a related technical field

Previous Experience:

• 4–5 years of experience in data engineering, data platform engineering, analytics engineering, or closely related technical disciplines.

• Proven experience building and maintaining data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows in a production environment.

• Experience developing dashboards and reports using BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and similar.

• Experience working with fundraising, CRM, or marketing data is a strong advantage.

• Experience designing and implementing integrations across multiple systems using APIs, middleware platforms, managed services, or bespoke engineering approaches.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Experience evolving data warehouse architectures within live operational environments, balancing modernization with continuity of reporting and operational needs.

• Experience in UN or international development organizations is an asset.

• Strong proficiency in SQL; experience with Python or similar scripting languages for data transformation.

• Hands-on experience with cloud-based data platforms, particularly Redshift and associated AWS services used to support data engineering and integration workloads.

• Familiarity with technologies supporting server-side data collection and activation (e.g. server-side GTM, Conversion APIs, event collection architectures) would be advantageous.

• Familiarity with modern data stack tools such as dbt, Airflow, Azure Devops, or similar orchestration and transformation tools.

• Strong ability to translate complex data requirements into clear, reliable, and user-friendly dashboard outputs.

• Solid understanding of data modelling principles, data governance, and data quality management.

• Knowledge of GDPR and data privacy principles as applied to fundraising and CRM data.

• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills, with a strong eye for detail.

• Ability to work independently in a fully remote environment, managing multiple deliverables and deadlines.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience providing technical leadership, mentoring, or guidance to less experienced colleagues would be advantageous.

• Demonstrates a proactive, solutions-oriented mindset committed to delivering results and continuous improvement.

Languages:

• Excellent written and spoken English is required

• Knowledge of another official UN language would be a plus.

WFP LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK

WFP Leadership Framework guides to the common standards of behavior that guide HOW we work together to accomplish our mission.

Click here to access WFP Leadership Framework

REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION

WFP is committed to supporting individuals with disabilities by providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process. If you require a reasonable accommodation, please contact:  global.inclusion@wfp.org

NO FEE DISCLAIMER

The United Nations does not charge any application, processing, training, interviewing, testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Should you receive a solicitation for the payment of a fee, please disregard it. Furthermore, please note that emblems, logos, names and addresses are easily copied and reproduced. Therefore, you are advised to apply particular care when submitting personal information on the web.

REMINDERS BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION

• All applications must be submitted exclusively through our online recruiting system. We do not consider CVs or applications sent by email, LinkedIn, or any other channel.

• We strongly recommend that your Workday profile is accurate and complete, and that all sections are filled in, including your employment history, academic qualifications, language skills, and UN grade (if applicable). Once your profile is completed, please apply, and submit your application.

• If you experience technical issues while submitting your application, you may contact us at global.hrerecruitment@wfp.org. Please note that this email is only for technical issues with an application - unsolicited applications or documents sent to this inbox will not receive a reply.

• At the application stage, the only required documents are your CV and Cover Letter. Additional documents (passport, certificates, recommendation letters, etc.) may be requested later in the process.

• Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and invited to proceed to the next stage of the recruitment process.

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.