National Project Personnel (DevOps 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 member countries 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 (SP5).

Reporting Lines

The position reports to the Operations and Programme Specialist (Management Information System), OER.

Technical Focus

Support the development and adoption of information management tools and best practices in support of FAO’s resilience agenda at a global, regional, sub-regional and/or country level.

Tasks and responsibilities

Under the overall supervision of the Resilience Expert, coordinator of the OER cash and voucher team, the direct supervision of the Operations and Programme Specialist, , and in close collaboration with the IT Division and responsible Information Technology Officer; the DevOps engineer will act as part of the OER MIS team tasked with setting up, securing and managing Linux virtual private server, for hosting existing FAO MIS tools which are used for managing beneficiary data in support of the implementation of FAO’s agenda at a global, regional, sub-regional and/or country level.

FAO currently uses a fleet of cloud servers to support desktop and web-based, database-driven software to register beneficiaries (including the collection of biometric data), and leverages this information to facilitate their entitlement disbursements. A skilled DevOps engineer is needed to join the team to assist in the automation and orchestration of routine server and developer tasks, to ensure high available, scalability and fast roll out in new FAO country offices.

In line with industry best-practice standards as well as FAO software development standards, the DevOps Engineer will:

• Gain a deep technical understanding of existing systems in use within FAO, including identification of relative strengths and weaknesses as well as potential overlap between systems. This will also include the servers hosting these systems, and the CI/CD processes already in place.
• Contribute to defining the FAO MIS corporate software suite and the DevOps team timeline, from a DevOps perspective.
• Setup, secure and manage remote Linux servers, to industry best practices and standards.
• Create and manage Ansible and Puppet infrastructures to support the work of the organization.
• Support planned pilots of systems within FAO’s field operations, including by developing adjustments in order to guarantee adaptability to different country contexts.
• Setup local DOs instances and train field staff.
• Guarantee continued support to DOs as needed.
• Support the development of the FAO MIS corporate suite of server orchestration scripts (Ansible, Puppet and Bash scripts).
• Undertake testing and post implementation review of the servers.
• Develop technical documentation in parallel with the infrastructure.
• Perform any other tasks relevant to the profile as may be assigned.

CANDIDATES WILL BE ASSESSED AGAINST THE FOLLOWING

Minimum Requirements

• University degree (Bachelor or equivalent) in Information Technologies, Computer science or other relevant fields;
• A minimum of three (3), preferable five (5) years of work experience setting up, securing and managing remote Linux servers.
• A minimum of three (3 years of work experience in Ansible, Puppet and Bash scripts.
• A working knowledge of the Amazon Web Services stack is required.
• Working knowledge (level C) of the FAO official language used for communication (English) is required; working knowledge of the local language(s) (French, Arabic or Spanish) will be an advantage.
• National of Kenya

FAO Core Competencies

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

Technical/Functional Skills

• At least three (3) years of setting up, securing and managing remote Linux servers is a core requirement.
• Server orchestration using Ansible, Puppet and bash scripts is a core requirement.
• Ability to work with Git is required.
• Knowledge of CI/CD tools will be an added advantage.

IT Skills

• Ability to effectively use standard office software, such as MS Office (Windows, Word, Outlook, Excel, Exchange). Ability to use accounting software and other information systems and databases to insert data, make inquiries, retrieve/define ad hoc reports and analyses and edit results in an appropriate format.

Interpersonal Communications and Teamwork Skills

• Cooperative spirit, flexibility and openness to work in an international environment.
• Tact and courtesy.
• Ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with people of different national and cultural backgrounds.
• Ability to effectively carry out training and capacity development activities for the end-users of the application

Travel and location

• The incumbent must be ready and able to travel to support different FAO field offices with training and seminars.