SENIOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS OFFICER

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment. UNEP’s Chief Digital Office (CDO) leads the Organization’s digital transformation, ensuring UNEP can scan, test and scale digital technologies to better support Member States, UNEP and partners in tackling the triple planetary crisis. The CDO provides vision, standards and governance for digital products, enterprise platforms, data and AI, and works across divisions, regional offices and MEA secretariats to embed digital-by-design approaches. This post is located in the Chief Digital Office at the Nairobi duty station and reports directly to the Chief Digital Officer, leading a team of technical professionals specialized in infrastructure and DevOps. Under the direct supervision of the Chief Digital Officer, the incumbent will be responsible for the following duties:

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. Data Platforms, Integration and Automation: • Lead the design, deployment and lifecycle management of large-scale, complex data platforms capable of ingesting, transforming and serving multi-format environmental, administrative and partner data from multiple regions, using modern data pipeline/ETL/ELT approaches. • Oversee the establishment and maintenance of enterprise data lakes, data warehouses and related storage/compute layers that support high-throughput analytics, GIS, advanced analytics and AI/ML workloads, with attention to quality, provenance, access control and API-based distribution. • Promote automation and orchestration of data pipelines and infrastructure (e.g. containers, Kubernetes, workflow engines) to support repeatable, testable and policy-compliant deployments across environments (development, test, staging, production). • Ensure close collaboration with application development, information management and environmental data teams to guarantee that platform and infrastructure capabilities meet current and emerging business requirements. 4. Leadership, Vendor Management and Field Coordination: • Lead and direct UNEP’s corporate team of infrastructure, systems, network, cloud, DevOps and information management officers, as well as ICT focal points in Headquarters, Offices Away from Headquarters (OAHs) and in Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA) secretariats, to implement UNEP-wide infrastructure and DevOps initiatives. • Plan and allocate work assignments; coach, mentor and evaluate staff; participate in recruitment and selection of new staff; foster a culture of automation, reliability, security-by-design and customer focus. • Manage and oversee multiple, concurrent and geographically distributed ICT projects that involve complex system integrations, dissimilar platforms, data-intensive workloads and collaboration with external partners. • Responsible for sourcing, outsourcing and establishing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with appropriate service providers (cloud, telecom, data centre, managed services) and ensuring delivery against those SLAs. 5. Coordination with UN System ICT Bodies: • Liaise and coordinate with the UN HQ Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) to ensure UNEP’s infrastructure and cloud requirements are considered within the UN Secretariat ICT strategy and UNEP’s compliance with Secretariat-wide ICT, cybersecurity and data-protection initiatives. • Represent UNEP on relevant UN ICT committees, including the UN Digital Technology Network (DTN) and specialized working groups on cloud, cybersecurity, data management and interoperability. • Lead team efforts to collect and analyze operational and service management data and provide insights to identify trends or patterns for data-driven capacity planning, incident reduction, cost optimization and reporting. Ensure that authorized users can discover, access, integrate and share the data they need. 6. Perform other related duties as assigned.

PROFESSIONALISM: Demonstrated knowledge or mastery of large-scale infrastructure design and operations, including cloud and hybrid architectures, network and identity integration, high-availability design, observability/monitoring and cybersecurity. Proven experience establishing and running DevOps practices (CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing) in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. Ability to oversee or troubleshoot complex data platforms, including data lakes and ETL/ELT pipelines supporting analytics and GIS workloads. Ability to integrate infrastructure decisions with broader strategic, policy and operational objectives of UNEP. Familiarity with UNEP’s business operations and linkages to UN-wide enterprise systems (e.g. Umoja, Inspira, UN Partner Portal) is desirable. Shows pride in work and in achievements; is conscientious and efficient in meeting commitments, observing deadlines and achieving results; is motivated by professional rather than personal concerns; shows persistence when faced with difficult problems or challenges; remains calm in stressful situations. The ability to analyze and interpret operational data in support of decision-making and convey resulting information to management is required. PLANNING AND ORGANIZING: Develops clear goals that are consistent with agreed strategies; identifies priority activities and assignments; adjusts priorities as required; allocates appropriate amount of time and resources for completing work; foresees risks and allows for contingencies when planning; monitors and adjusts plans and actions as necessary; uses time efficiently; plans for capacity, resilience and lifecycle management of infrastructure components. ACCOUNTABILITY: Takes ownership of all responsibilities and honors commitments; delivers outputs for which one has responsibility within prescribed time, cost and quality standards; operates in compliance with organizational regulations and rules; supports subordinates, provides oversight and takes responsibility for delegated assignments; takes personal responsibility for his/her own shortcomings and those of the work unit, where applicable. LEADERSHIP: Serves as a role model that other people want to follow; empowers others to translate vision into results; is proactive in developing strategies to accomplish objectives; establishes and maintains relationships with a broad range of people to understand needs and gain support; anticipates and resolves conflicts by pursuing mutually agreeable solutions; drives for change and improvements; does not accept the status quo; shows the courage to take unpopular stands when necessary to protect the Organization’s information assets and service quality. Provides leadership and takes responsibility for incorporating gender perspectives and ensuring the equal participation of women and men in all areas of work; demonstrates knowledge of strategies and commitment to the goal of gender balance in staffing. VISION: Identifies strategic issues, opportunities and risks in the infrastructure and cloud space; clearly communicates links between the Organization's strategy and the work unit's goals; generates and communicates broad and compelling organizational direction, inspiring others to pursue that same direction; conveys enthusiasm about future possibilities, including adoption of emerging infrastructure technologies where appropriate and cost-effective.

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.

Additional formal training or certifications in one or more of the following areas is desirable: cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP); Kubernetes/containers; IT service management (ITIL); information security (CISSP, CISM); DevOps/DevSecOps.

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.

English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat. For this job opening, English is required. There are no additional desirable languages specified. The table below shows the minimum required level for each skill in these languages, according to the UN Language Framework (please consult

https://languages.un.org

for details).

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Required Languages

Language

Reading

Writing

Listening

Speaking

English

UN Level II

UN Level II

UN Level II

UN Level II

Evaluation of qualified candidates may include an assessment exercise which may be followed by competency-based interview.

Appointment against this position is for an initial period of one (1) year and may be subject to extension. Staff members are subject to the authority of the Secretary-General and to assignment by him or her. External candidate selected for this position will be granted a fixed-term appointment limited ("FTA limited") in accordance with section 2.2 (b) of administrative instruction ST/AI/2013/1 on Administration of fixed-term appointments. Renewal of appointment is contingent upon continued existence of mandate and availability of funding. If this position is discontinued, the incumbent will be separated from service. United Nations Secretariat staff members who meet the definition of "internal candidate" in staff rule 4.10 who are selected for this position will be reassigned or transferred to the position, without a lien to their parent position. Staff members are subject to the authority of the Secretary-General and to assignment by him or her. In this context, all staff are expected to move periodically to new functions in their careers in accordance with established rules and procedures. Staff members of the United Nations Secretariat must fulfil the lateral move requirements to be eligible to apply for this vacancy. Staff members are requested to indicate all qualifying lateral moves in their Candidate Profile (CP) and motivation statement. The United Nations Secretariat is committed to achieving 50/50 gender balance and geographical diversity in its staff. Female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply for this position. Individual Contractors and Consultants who have worked within the UN Secretariat in the last six months, are ineligible to apply for or be appointed to any professional and higher temporary or fixed term positions, within six months of the end of their current or most recent service. For such positions, at least six months need to have elapsed between the end of a consultancy or individual contract and the time of application and consideration for an appointment as a staff member under the Staff Rules and Regulations of the United Nations. The requirement is not applicable when a person considered for appointment is serving or has previously served as affiliated personnel (for example as a consultant, individual contractor, intern or gratis personnel) with a specialized agency or an Office, Fund or Programme such as UNHCR, UNICEF, UNDP or UNOPS which is separately administered and funded from voluntary contributions. When completing the Candidate Profile form, ensure ALL fields, ALL professional experience and contact information are completed and up to date. This information is the basis for the hiring manager to assess your eligibility and suitability for the position and to contact you. At the United Nations, the paramount consideration in the recruitment and employment of staff is the necessity of securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence and integrity, with due regard to geographic diversity. All employment decisions are made on the basis of qualifications and organizational needs. The United Nations is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment of mutual respect. The United Nations recruits and employs staff regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds or disabilities. Reasonable accommodation for applicants with disabilities may be provided to support participation in the recruitment process when requested and indicated in the application. All applicants are strongly encouraged to apply on-line as soon as possible after the job opening has been posted and well before the deadline stated in the job opening. On-line applications will be acknowledged where an email address has been provided. If you do not receive an e-mail acknowledgement within 24 hours of submission, your application may not have been received. If the problem persists, please seek technical assistance through the Inspira "Contact Us" link.

According to article 101, paragraph 3, of the Charter of the United Nations, the paramount consideration in the employment of the staff is the necessity of securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity. Candidates will not be considered for employment with the United Nations if they have committed violations of international human rights law, violations of international humanitarian law, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, or sexual harassment, or if there are reasonable grounds to believe that they have been involved in the commission of any of these acts. The term “sexual exploitation” means any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust, for sexual purposes, including, but not limited to, profiting monetarily, socially or politically from the sexual exploitation of another. The term “sexual abuse” means the actual or threatened physical intrusion of a sexual nature, whether by force or under unequal or coercive conditions. The term “sexual harassment” means any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature that might reasonably be expected or be perceived to cause offence or humiliation, when such conduct interferes with work, is made a condition of employment or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment, and when the gravity of the conduct warrants the termination of the perpetrator’s working relationship. Candidates who have committed crimes other than minor traffic offences may not be considered for employment. Due regard will be paid to the importance of recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible. The United Nations places no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs. The United Nations Secretariat is a non-smoking environment. Reasonable accommodation may be provided to applicants with disabilities upon request, to support their participation in the recruitment process. By accepting a letter of appointment, staff members are subject to the authority of the Secretary-General, who may assign them to any of the activities or offices of the United Nations in accordance with staff regulation 1.2 (c). Further, staff members in the Professional and higher category up to and including the D-2 level and the Field Service category are normally required to move periodically to discharge functions in different duty stations under conditions established in ST/AI/2023/3 on Mobility, as may be amended or revised. This condition of service applies to all position specific job openings and does not apply to temporary positions. Applicants are urged to carefully follow all instructions available in the online recruitment platform, inspira, and to refer to the Applicant Guide by clicking on “Manuals” in the “Help” tile of the inspira account-holder homepage. The evaluation of applicants will be conducted on the basis of the information submitted in the application according to the evaluation criteria of the job opening and the applicable internal legislations of the United Nations including the Charter of the United Nations, resolutions of the General Assembly, the Staff Regulations and Rules, administrative issuances and guidelines. Applicants must provide complete and accurate information pertaining to their personal profile and qualifications according to the instructions provided in inspira to be considered for the current job opening. No amendment, addition, deletion, revision or modification shall be made to applications that have been submitted. Candidates under serious consideration for selection will be subject to reference checks to verify the information provided in the application. All external candidates recruited in accordance with section ‎2.2 (a) of ST/AI/2025/3 for a fixed term appointment without limitation and all external candidates recruited in accordance with section 2.2. (c) of ST/AI/2025/3 for a fixed term appointment limited to the entity are subject to an initial probationary period of one year under a fixed-term appointment. Job openings advertised on the Careers Portal will be removed at 11:59 p.m. (New York time) on the deadline date.

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.