Data Engineer

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has a Centre for Humanitarian Data in The Hague, the Netherlands which is focused on increasing the use and impact of data in the humanitarian sector. The vision is to create a future where all people involved in a humanitarian emergency have access to the data they need, when and how they need it, to make responsible and informed decisions. The Centre has four workstreams: data services, data responsibility, data literacy and predictive analytics.

As part of the data services workstream, the Centre manages the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) which is an open platform for sharing data across crises and organisations. Launched in July 2014, the goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis. Our growing collection of datasets has been accessed by millions of users in over 200 countries and territories. HDX is based on CKAN, an open-source data management system for powering data hubs and portals. The Centre has built a Python library to interact with the CKAN API to support a suite of scrapers that extract humanitarian data from remote files or APIs for upload as datasets into the portal and for use in visualisations.

The Centre is seeking to expand its team with a Data Engineer who has the skills and experience to investigate, clean and transform data sources, making them available in a form suitable for analysis, reporting and visualisation. We are looking for a candidate who is self-motivated and can thrive in an international, multidisciplinary team. The right candidate has the skills and abilities to develop both novel prototypes to fulfil immediate demands and robust solutions to satisfy longer term needs, to understand existing systems and update them to meet new requirements, and to think strategically about improvements to HDX’s data pipelines and processes.

Reporting Relationships
The Data Engineer will report to the Data Systems Team Lead under the overall direction of the Lead for the Centre for Humanitarian Data. She or he will be expected to work closely with the rest of the Centre team.

-         Automate extraction, cleaning and transformation of data from external file storage and APIs for upload into HDX and/or visualisation.

-         Check metadata and data ingested into HDX meet accuracy, consistency and comparability requirements.

-         Learn about the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) and use it to improve data interoperability.

-         Ensure existing and new data pipelines operate reliably, refactoring and improving them as needed.

-         Work with other teams in the Centre to enhance the architecture and implementation of their data pipelines.

-         Add functionality to the Centre’s Python libraries as needed including testing and documentation.

-         Productionise successful prototypes integrating them into the Centre’s infrastructure in partnership with the dev team.

-         Work with HDX data contributors and data consumers to identify new projects and areas of opportunities for data integration.

Education 

Work Experience

Language

Contract type: Individual Contractor Agreement holders (ICAs)
Contract level: IICA-1/LICA-9/ICSC-9
Contract duration: 6 months initially with the possibility of extension  (retainer contract modality)

This is not a position in UNOPS. UNOPS is solely providing operational support to its partner UNOCHA for this recruitment process. The selected candidate will be a personnel member of UNOCA under its full responsibility and salaries and benefits will be decided by UNOCHA.

• 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.

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.