Consultancy - Principal Data Engineer, Office of Innovation/Giga, 12 months, Barcelona, Spain, REQ#560668

UNICEF/Giga seeks a principal data engineer to end-to-end design/architect and support implementation of our products and DataOps platform.

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child, innovate...

About Giga

Launched in 2019 as a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet.

Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality.  

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%.  

You cannot fix a problem unless you can see it, so the first step is to map schools and their connectivity levels. Giga uses machine learning to scan satellite images and identify schools. These are then marked by coloured dots on an open-source map: green where there is good connectivity (over 5mb/s); amber where it is limited; and red where there is no connectivity at all.

Just as building railroads allowed previously isolated towns to flourish, providing good quality Internet access will allow communities to participate in the digital economy for the first time. But Giga’s work in laying the tracks for connectivity is only one part of a wider effort to bridge the digital divide. UNICEF’s Reimagine Education initiative brings all of this work together and has set the goal of connecting every child and young person – some 3.5 billion - to world-class digital learning solutions by 2030. In addition to Giga, it includes components focusing on the affordability of data and content, access to devices, teacher certification and the engagement of young people. Along with ITU’s digital skills programme and other initiatives, Reimagine Education aims to ensure that, once connected, young people are empowered with the tools they need to shape their own futures.  

You can read more about Giga’s work at https://giga.global and by following us on twitter @Gigaglobal

How can you make a difference? 

• Architect and manage technically robust, resilient and scalable DataOps platform - a set of synced tools to maintain sanity and consistency across the entire data lifecycle of ingestion, transformation, storage, access and sharing in an automated manner.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, analysts and engineers to estimate technical feasibility of their respective products/projects and to translate products specifications into technical architecture flows and roadmaps.
• Architect and manage data workflows and tech stack of Giga’s products.
• Build proof of concept products or mockups for product market testing.
• Guide and support vendors and partners in building products.
• Build key data pipelines and workflows prototypes for Giga’s flagship products like DataOps and ML model for school detection.
• You set up the data engineering culture and best practices and champion their adoption at the same time.
• As a Senior technical member, you manage your KPIs, contribute to product strategy and help develop technical and data teams.

Expected results

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have… 

• University degree in Computer Science or similar field.
• At least five years of relevant work experience in building and managing open-source data products
• Deep understanding & expertise in building and managing DataOps Platforms - data pipelines, ingestion, storage, data processing, and data governance.
• Experience with open-source data engineering and governance technologies like Airflow or any other major orchestration tool, Python, Apache Atlas or DataHub, Apache Superset, Kubernetes clusters, Great Expectations package.
• Strong knowledge of ML lifecycle with MLOps.
• Experience on functional and technical requirements gathering
• Experience using agile methodology and use of software ticketing systems (Jira, Github)
• Experience with git-based repositories
• Experience on implementing automated testing (QA) and continuous integration with systems
• Excellent leadership skills to mentor engineers.
• Active open-source contributions and have a good understanding of open-source DataOps tools & ecosystem.
• Experience with JavaScript and JS frameworks is a plus.
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset. 

Payment details and further considerations

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.
• Consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance
• Consultant is responsible to arrange his/her own travel, including visa

Duty Station : Barcelona, Spain 

Duration: 12 months

Insurance:

UNICEF will not be responsible for costs arising from accidents and/or illness incurred during the consultant’s service. Therefore, the selected candidate must provide proof of enrollment in a health/accident plan prior to starting his/her work.

How to apply: 

• Interested applicant is required to submit a financial proposal with all-inclusive fee. Please complete your profile in UNICEF's e-Recruitment system.
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class), daily subsistence allowance (limited to UN official rates), and other estimated costs such as visa and travel/health insurance. Please indicate your ability, availability and financial proposal (in US$) to undertake the terms of reference above.
• Applications submitted without a financial proposal will not be considered.

For every Child, you demonstrate… 

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS). 

To view our competency framework, please visit  here. 

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment. 

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check. 

Remarks:  

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process. 

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws. 

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.