Engineering Lead – AI for Knowledge Hub

Result of Service

Ultimate Result of Service Establish engineering and infrastructure capacity for the AI for Knowledge Initiative to: i) Deploy the AI for Knowledge Platform for Global use by UN-Habitat Staff. ii) Establish repeatable engineering practices, documentation, and operational processes that allow the platform to be maintained and scaled for future public availability.

Work Location

Nairobi

Expected duration

6 months

Duties and Responsibilities

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-Habitat, is the agency for human Settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all. The position is located in Knowledge and Innovation Branch of UN-Habitat in Nairobi. The Knowledge and Innovation Branch is responsible for generating data and analysis which feeds into high-level global reporting on substantive findings as well as identifying emerging innovations and solutions which are scalable, expanding and leveraging greater impact of the UN-Habitat work programme and strategy. The consultant will be reporting to the Programme Management Officer, KIB, and he/she will be responsible for the following tasks: • Shape the Initiative's technical roadmap in collaboration with the ML Lead and Team Lead, ensuring infrastructure decisions align with product direction and UN-Habitat’s mission. • Serve as technical counterpart to partners and stakeholders on infrastructure and integration matters, translating product requirements into practical solutions. • Design the Hub's architecture – secure, scalable, and production-grade – to facilitate internal deployment across Country Offices and prepare for future public availability. • Establish engineering standards and infrastructure environments and workflows for reliable dev/test/prod – including CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code. • Develop and maintain backend APIs and service components supporting analytical execution, dataset access, and broader platform functionality. • Implement security and access control across the platform, including authentication, authorisation, role-based access, and secrets and identity management. • Ensure infrastructure reliability and operational readiness through monitoring, logging, backup, recovery, and performance management practices. • Produce and maintain technical documentation – including architecture diagrams, operational runbooks. • Build engineering capacity as the initiative scales, including supporting and mentoring new team members and collaborating with technical contributors

Qualifications/special skills

Advanced university degree (Master’s degree or equivalent) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Physics, Maths, or a related quantitative/technical field. A first-level university degree in combination with two additional years of qualifying experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree. At least 2 years of relevant work experience in software engineering, data engineering, or platform/infrastructure roles is required. Experience in end-to-end ownership of at least one production system (e.g. backend services, data services, APIs, or platform infrastructure) is required Experience in cloud infrastructure is required. Experience in version control, CI/CD, and containerisation is required. Experience in developing backend services and APIs is required. Experience in operating relational databases in production is required. Experience in secure deployment practices (authentication, authorisation, secrets management, role-based access control) is required Experience in operational reliability (monitoring, logging, production debugging) is required. Experience in writing/maintaining documentation and creating technical diagrams is required. Experience collaborating with non-technical stakeholders and translating product requirements into technical solutions is required. Experience working in infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Bicep, Pulumi) is desirable Experience programming in Python and TypeScript/JavaScript is desirable Experience working in a Microsoft Azure environment is desirable Experience mentoring engineers or supporting team growth is desirable Experience working with object storage and lakehouse architectures is desirable

Languages

English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat. For this position, fluency in English (both oral and written) is required.

Additional Information

Not available.

No Fee

THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CHARGE A FEE AT ANY STAGE OF THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS (APPLICATION, INTERVIEW MEETING, PROCESSING, OR TRAINING). THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CONCERN ITSELF WITH INFORMATION ON APPLICANTS’ BANK ACCOUNTS.