Engineering Lead – AI for Knowledge Hub

The consultant will establish engineering and infrastructure capacity for the AI for Knowledge Initiative at UN-Habitat, deploying the AI for Knowledge Platform for global use and establishing repeatable engineering practices and operational processes for maintenance and scaling. The role involves shaping technical roadmaps, designing secure and scalable architecture, developing backend APIs, implementing security controls, ensuring operational readiness, and building engineering capacity.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Skills

• Software Engineering
• Data Engineering
• Platform Infrastructure
• Cloud Infrastructure Management
• Version Control Systems
• CI/CD
• Containerisation
• Backend Services Development
• API Development
• Relational database management
• Secure Deployment Practices
• Authentication
• Authorisation
• Secrets Management
• Role-Based Access Control
• Operational Reliability
• Monitoring
• Logging
• Production Debugging
• Technical Documentation Production
• Technical Diagramming

Languages

English