System Administrator / Ops Engineer (part-time)

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is seeking a part time Ops Engineer / System Administrator. OCHA currently maintains multiple web-based platforms that are used in humanitarian response. Although some of our brands have been used for over a decade, ongoing investment has kept our technology modern and relevant.
The successful candidate will work with our web-based development teams to maintain and grow the reliable infrastructure that is used by hundreds of thousands of humanitarian responders, supporting staff, and volunteers during sudden onset and complex emergencies. 

The successful candidate must be based in the Americas’ time zones and provide support for four hours between 17:00 GMT and 22:00 GMT

The UN OCHA team operates as a collaboration between developers and operations (“DevOps”). You will work collaboratively with developers to ensure an excellent developer experience; site manager experience; and site visitor experience.

●        Support the process of planning, creating, and documenting scalable, secure, and highly available infrastructure for internal development teams.

●        Review and update documentation, diagrams, and training documents which outline best practices and standard operating procedures (“runbooks”) to empower developers to leverage existing infrastructure.

●        Contribute to the creation of automated and repeatable deployment systems including appropriate development, staging and production environments.

●        Collaborate with developers to help design appropriate requirements for systems, network, and application architecture

●        Contribute to the creation of disaster recovery plans including the development of incident response plans; if necessary, work with teams to implement plans in emergency situations

●        Support and maintain strong relationships with the engineering team and project managers

●        Be actively contactable through assigned working times and reachable, at a general knowledgeable level, in the case of a major emergency. Expectations are that you will rely on another part-term system administrator as well the OCHA developers to ensure basic 24 hour coverage.

Contract type: ICA
Contract level: IICA-1/ICSC-8
Contract duration: 3 months with possible extension

Education:

●        A Bachelor’s degree in related fields is required. A Master’s degree in related field can substitute two years of the required relevant experience. 

●        Secondary education with additional four (4) years of relevant experience may be accepted in lieu of a bachelor’s degree. A relevant technical certificate with additional experience may also be accepted. 

Required Qualifications

●        At least 2 years of relevant experience is required.

●        Experience in a collaborative (“DevOps”) environment is critical. Developers will share your responsibility of ensuring app stability on a stable infrastructure.

●        Production experience with a multi-server, load balanced environment. Preference given to candidates with this experience in a Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent).

●        Production experience with a configuration management tool deployed in a multi-server, load-balanced environment. Preference given to Ansible; experience with Chef, Puppet, or equivalent will also be considered.

●        Ability to clearly communicate technical information and with consideration and compassion for the technical abilities of the people they are communicating with

Desired Skills

●        Production experience supporting or building web applications in at least one of: PHP, Python, Node.js.

●        Production experience with database optimisations for performance and availability. Preference given to MySQL / MariaDB; experience with Postgres, or equivalent will also be considered.

●        Production experience with build automation tools such as Jenkins or Bamboo

●        Demonstrable experience with Git, GitHub, GitLab, and/or Bitbucket

●        Demonstrable experience with shell scripting

●        Production experience with system administration for large scale Drupal deployments.

●        Experience with the components of a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or LEMP (Linux, NGINX, MySQL, PHP) stack.

●        RHCE certification or experience with general administration of Debian-based Linux distributions.

●        Experience with configuring logging and monitoring tools; and taking action based on the reported alerts (ELK stack, Nagios, and equivalent tools)

●        Experience building, installing, and maintaining Linux-based packages for software deployment (RPM or .deb)

●        Experience with data migration projects.

●        Experience with multi-server hosting environments (N-Tier, sharding, scaling, failover)

●        Experience with caching & high availability configuration techniques

●        Experience building and deploying Docker containers, and Docker-housed applications

●        Ability to accurately explain and document software development and release processes

Language Skills

●        Working-level English; with excellent written communication skills (this is a remote position, so most communications will be in writing via text-based chat; or email)

• Please note that the closing date is midnight Copenhagen time
• Applications received after the closing date will not be considered.
• Only those candidates that are short-listed for interviews will be notified.
• Qualified female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.
• The incumbent is responsible to abide by security policies, administrative instructions, plans and procedures of the UN Security Management System and that of UNOPS.  

It is the policy of UNOPS to conduct background checks on all potential recruits/interns.
Recruitment/internship in UNOPS is contingent on the results of such checks.

UNOPS is an operational arm of the United Nations, supporting the successful implementation of its partners’ peacebuilding, humanitarian and development projects around the world. Our mission is to help people build better lives and countries achieve sustainable development.

UNOPS areas of expertise cover infrastructure, procurement, project management, financial management and human resources.

Working with us

UNOPS offers short- and long-term work opportunities in diverse and challenging environments across the globe. We are looking for creative, results-focused professionals with skills in a range of disciplines.

Diversity

With over 4,000 UNOPS personnel and approximately 7,000 personnel recruited on behalf of UNOPS partners spread across 80 countries, our workforce represents a wide range of nationalities and cultures. We promote a balanced, diverse workforce — a strength that helps us better understand and address our partners’ needs, and continually strive to improve our gender balance through initiatives and policies that encourage recruitment of qualified female candidates.

Work life harmonization

UNOPS values its people and recognizes the importance of balancing professional and personal demands.

Sustainable Development Cluster (SDC)

Based in New York, the Sustainable Development Cluster (SDC) supports diverse partners with their peacebuilding, humanitarian and development operations.

The SDC’s services include grants management, development and special initiatives support, and technology support to the UN and UN agencies.

The SDC is part of the New York Service Cluster that supports the United Nations Secretariat, as well as a broadening community of other New York-based United Nations organizations, bilateral and multilateral partners in the delivery of UNOPS mandate in project management, infrastructure management, and procurement management.