Senior Information Systems Officer, P5 at United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

Responsibilities

• Strategic Infrastructure and DevOps Leadership:
• Provide authoritative technical and policy advice to senior management, ICT governance bodies and solution working groups on enterprise infrastructure, cloud strategy, platform engineering and DevOps, including implications of alternative architectures (on-premises, cloud, hybrid, edge) for performance, resilience, information security and cost.
• Conceptualize, develop strategies for and oversee the design, build and operation of UNEP-wide infrastructure platforms that support mission-critical applications, enterprise data platforms, environmental information systems and the World Environment Situation Room, in accordance with UNEP’s Digital Transformation strategy and the Organization’s Digital Governance Process.
• Define and promote infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, monitoring/observability, automated testing and CI/CD practices to improve delivery speed, repeatability and service quality across UNEP.
• Prepare and monitor the budget, work programme and spending plan for UNEP-wide infrastructure and DevOps initiatives, ensuring efficient resource utilization and alignment with enterprise architecture.
• Develop and maintain innovative, secure and sustainable infrastructure solutions to resolve problems that impact critical areas of the Organization’s work, particularly those involving large-scale, multi-source data ingestion, high-availability services and geographically distributed users
• Act as Chair of the UNEP-wide ICT Solutions Group within the overall UNEP Digital Governance Process, on behalf of and in close collaboration with the Chief Digital Officer, to drive standards, re-use of components, and alignment with UN Secretariat ICT directions.
• Infrastructure Operations, Cloud and Cybersecurity Oversight:
• Establish, maintain and continuously improve UNEP’s infrastructure standards, procedures and practices to ensure a stable, secure, high-performing and environmentally sustainable ICT environment, including metrics and service-level objectives (SLOs) for availability, latency, capacity, and cost.
• Lead the design and management of hybrid infrastructure topologies, including UN-hosted, partner-hosted, public cloud (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and on-premises data centre components, ensuring interoperability, identity and access management integration, network security and data protection.
• Oversee information security management and ensure cybersecurity compliance with UN Secretariat policies and international standards; devise policies and technical controls to protect confidentiality, integrity and availability of UNEP’s information assets, including data lakes, analytics platforms and integration services.
• Ensure that infrastructure and platform projects meet established time and cost parameters and standards of technical quality, reflect user needs, and minimize duplication of infrastructure and tooling across the Organization

Education

• An advanced university degree (Master’s or Doctorate degree, or equivalent) in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field is required.
• A first-level university degree in combination with two (2) additional years of qualifying experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree.

Work Experience

• A minimum of ten (10) years of progressively responsible experience in planning, design, implementation, operation and lifecycle management of enterprise ICT infrastructure or related area is required.
• Experience leading infrastructure and/or DevOps teams responsible for large-scale, high-availability, secure environments (including hybrid cloud and on-premises data centres) is required.
• Experience in designing, deploying and operating complex data platforms, including data lakes or data warehouses that integrate multi-source, multi-format data with strict performance, quality and security requirements, is required.
• Experience in establishing and running CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and automated monitoring/observability in an agile development and deployment environment is desirable.
• Experience in developing and implementing ICT strategies and governance frameworks, and familiarity with ERP and UN or similar enterprise systems, is desirable.
• Experience in the United Nations Common System organizations or a comparable international, multi-location organization is desirable. Experience in data science, data analytics or related area is desirable.
• Experience deploying and scaling AI models in production, including Large Language Models (LLMs), predictive, computer vision, and ensemble models, is desirable.