Engineering Lead - AI for Knowledge Hub

Organizational Context

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) is the UN agency for human settlements, mandated to promote sustainable towns and cities. This role is within the Knowledge and Innovation Branch in Nairobi, which focuses on generating data, analysis, and identifying scalable innovations to enhance UN-Habitat's work.

Job Purpose

This role establishes the engineering and infrastructure capacity for the AI for Knowledge Initiative. The primary purpose is to deploy the AI for Knowledge Platform for global use by UN-Habitat staff and to develop repeatable engineering practices, documentation, and operational processes. This ensures the platform can be effectively maintained, scaled, and prepared for future public availability, thereby enhancing UN-Habitat's data analysis and innovation capabilities.

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include shaping the initiative's technical roadmap in alignment with product direction and UN-Habitat's mission, and serving as the technical counterpart for infrastructure and integration matters. The role involves designing a secure, scalable, production-grade architecture for the Knowledge Hub, facilitating internal deployment and future public access. Establishing engineering standards, reliable dev/test/prod workflows with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code are crucial. Developing and maintaining backend APIs, implementing robust security and access controls, and ensuring operational readiness through monitoring and performance management are also key duties. Producing technical documentation and building engineering capacity through mentoring are essential.

Work Experience

Requires at least 2 years of relevant work experience in software engineering, data engineering, or platform/infrastructure roles. Experience in end-to-end ownership of a production system, cloud infrastructure, version control, CI/CD, backend services/APIs, and secure deployment practices is essential.

Skills

Technical roadmap development, infrastructure design and architecture, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, backend API development, security implementation (authentication, authorization), operational reliability (monitoring, logging), technical documentation, stakeholder collaboration, mentoring engineers.

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