Data Engineer - CBT (World Food Programme)

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

WFP country offices deliver assistance to beneficiaries through a variety of digital platforms and service providers. In 2017, WFP worked in partnership with more than 70 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.

Several challenges exist in streamlining digital analysis globally, including the tasks of receiving and maintaining massive amounts of varied and unstructured operational data, processing and generating meaningful analysis of data, while ensuring that data privacy and security standards are upheld. WFP’s Technology Division in HQ is establishing a digital core of technical infrastructure, including a “Data Lake” where it is intended that data from WFP’s corporate systems (WINGS, COMET and SCOPE) will be stored and made accessible for analysis along with other operational data from FSPs, MMOs, CFM and retailers among others. The Data Lake provides an opportunity to develop centralised data analytics by hosting the relevant data in one accessible location.

To achieve the objectives outlined above, WFP is recruiting a Data Engineer to be part of a central analytics team based in its Rome Headquarters, in the CBT Unit in the Office of the Chief of Staff, to provide support to WFP’s CBT operations globally.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Interface with WFP Country Offices to develop customized strategies for data collection, processing and ingestion into the Data Lake.
• Building code to support APIs for data consumption.
• Develop a strategy for systematically receiving, transforming and processing raw operational data from external services providers and partners, and assess data integration needs with key WFP corporate systems, such as WINGS, COMET, SCOPE, etc.
• Test different options to move and store big data in an optimized way (i.e. performance and cost), ensuring links with corporate systems, in collaboration with WFP Technology Division.
• Assess data landscape to ensure data that may include personally identifiable information (PII) is stored and managed according to WFP’s data privacy guidelines, in collaboration with WFP Technology Division.
• Contribute to develop and implement standard operating procedures to ensure integrity of data and processes.
• Continuously monitoring and testing the system to ensure optimized performance.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:

Education: A degree in Computer Science or Information Technology is a must for anyone to be a data engineer. Certifications from top tech companies, a plus.

Skills & Knowledge: 

• Strong in data warehousing, database administration, cloud computing, ETL/ELT, interacting with APIs or streaming data.
• Experience in most or all of the following: SQL databases, Hadoop, big data services offered by AWS or other cloud providers, an ETL/ELT tool like Alteryx, NiFi or Talend.
• Mature judgement. Experience in working in a multicultural environment.

Languages: English (fluent). Any other UN languages, a plus.