The Organization
The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) delivers research-based solutions that harness agricultural biodiversity and sustainably transform food systems to improve people's lives. Alliance solutions address the global crises of malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation.
With novel partnerships, the Alliance generates evidence and mainstreams innovations to transform food systems and landscapes so that they sustain the planet, drive prosperity, and nourish people in a climate crisis.
The Alliance is part of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future.
https://alliancebioversityciat.org/ www.cgiar.org
About the position
Based in Rome, Italy, at the Alliance Headquarters, or remotely based within the European Union, and reporting to a Scientist, the Data Engineering Officer will be responsible for coordinating with the CGIAR Hub for Sustainable Finance (Impact SF), ensuring deliverables are met in a timely manner.
The CGIAR Hub for Sustainable Finance (ImpactSF) was set up in 2022 to mainstream CGIAR wide knowledge and expertise on environmentally friendly interventions to improve climate adaptation and resilience of the agriculture and food system, into sustainable financing and investment processes. This mainstreaming has and will continue to result in the generation and management of vast amounts of data. ImpactSF through its data driven service offerings, envisions improving flow of public and private capital to improve sustainability of agriculture and food systems in the global south. This is timely, as there is simultaneous demand from financial institutions (both private and public) and regulators to use science-based approaches to identify, implement, measure, monitor and report impacts of their investments.
Together with the data management (development and operations team / DevOps) and data science team, the role of the data engineer will be to develop protocols, implement and maintain processes to structure and automate processes, that will provide the basis of ImpactSF's data driven service offerings, to the financial sector.
Responsibilities
- Design, construct, install, test and maintain highly scalable data management systems. Processes include architecture/schema design, ETL processes, data pipeline deployment/optimization and monitoring, AI/ML model deployment.
- Building data pipelines (e.g., using Airflow) to collect data and move it into storage, preparing data as part of an ETL or ELT process, and frameworks/microservices to serve data.
- Employ a variety of languages and tools (e.g., Spark, SQL, Python, Java, Scala) for data modelling and integration.
- Experience with tools that work on cloud (e.g., AWS) and on-premises servers.
- Align/co-manage software delivery services through Infrastructure-As-Code together with DevOps teams.
- Based on data scientist requirements, build scalable data pipelines for data acquisition, staging into a data warehouse and architect data warehouse multidimensional models.
- Create custom software components (e.g., specialized UDFs) and analytical applications.
- Data monitoring: Perform analysis of system data to identify patterns, exceptions, and erroneous data. Ensure that data validation processes, data quality control standards, testing strategy and test plans for data services are applied to applications.
- Work with the Technology Integration team to refine and tighten the security framework and access control for internal and external information/data sharing. Also co-develop governance processes for managing services (version control), support services, service migration, monitoring, and evaluation of services.
- Research new database technologies and recommend solutions to improve performance, scalability, & storage.
Requirements
Essential Requirements
- A minimum of a master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- Previous relevant work experience (preferably minimum 2 years) working with data product and service development teams is desirable.
- Demonstrated experience (e.g., certifications from cloud platforms) on data engineering tools (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka) on both relational SQL and NoSQL databases.
- Demonstrated experience on object-oriented/object function scripting languages (such as Python, Java, C++, Scala).
- Demonstrated experience with data pipeline and workflow management tools (e.g., Airflow) and stream processing systems (e.g., Storm).
- Strong analytical skills related to both structured and unstructured datasets.
- Strong project management and organizational skills.
- Well-versed in delivering effective communications and experienced in addressing the needs of business teams.
- Native English speaker, or fluent with idiomatic command of English, and demonstrably high verbal and written English skills.
- Excellent interpersonal skills including the ability to work effectively with other national and cultural backgrounds.
- Superior analysis and insight generation capacity.
- Excellent eye for detail, critical thinking, high standards of excellence, personal organization, prioritization and time management skills, flexibility, and the ability to deliver on agreed deadlines.
- Ability to work with a considerable amount of autonomy.
Benefits
Terms of employment
This is a locally recruited position which will be based either in Rome, Italy, at the Alliance Headquarters, or remotely within the European Union. The salary is level 9, on a scale of 14 levels, with level 14 being the highest. The Alliance offers an attractive remuneration package which includes a competitive salary, leave provisions, medical and life insurance, and non-contributory retirement plan. The contract will be for a period of 2 years, subject to a probationary period of 6 months, and is renewable based on performance and availability of funds.
Please note that eligible applicants must have the legal status to live and work in the European Union. Citizens of EU countries and citizens of non-EU countries are individually responsible for compliance with requirements and formalities established by the national immigration law of the country where they stay and carry out their working activity.
Applications
Please apply online through the website ( https://alliancebioversityciat.org/careers ) no later than 15 December 2023, attaching a curriculum vitae, motivation letter, both in English, and contact information (e.g. names, email address) of at least three references. Please note that only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
Closing date for applications: 15 December 2023
We invite you to learn more about us at:
http://alliancebioversityciat.org
Please visit our careers page at:
https://alliancebioversityciat.org/careers