Developer Consultant
Tower Project (Working Title)
Innovation Unit, Office of Executive Director
Duty Station: NYHQ
Start Date: Immediate
Reporting to: Christopher Fabian, Co-Lead UNICEF Innovation Unit
BACKGROUND
UNICEF’s Innovation Unit in New York helps UNICEF’s 135+ Country Offices strengthen programmes on the ground using innovative approaches and technologies. UNICEF’s Innovation Unit creates and guides approaches that are transformative, at scale, for the world’s most vulnerable children. Innovation at UNICEF is a collaboration that translates ideas, technologies, and partnerships into products, services, and processes to bring about better, more equitable results for children. Strategically, the team looks at everything from using new and existing technologies, to engaging in new types of partnerships with external thinkers to deliver better results for children.
The Tower Project is looking to monitor and predict natural disasters and other instances of social stress by looking at new types of data such as volume of calls and SMS or remote sensing data in order to trigger the U-report investigation system.
PURPOSE OF THE CONSULTANCY
The Tower Project is seeking a Developer Consultant to assist with the real-time prototyping of the Tower Project and create important technical connections between UNICEF’s disparate products. This consultant will also serve as a liaison between UNICEF and Global Pulse.
DELIVERABLES
1) Workplan for 6 months
2) Bi-weekly meetings with Global Pulse and UNICEF outlining progress on project
3) Build out modules to connect U-report data to new types of real time data sources of information such as BTS data
4) Document APIs for U-report to connect to big mapping software
5) Examine outputs from IBM/Watson parsing of U-report data and determine options for the parsed data to be used as a data stream
6) Create cleaner connections between Devtrac and RapidSMS
7) Create a system to connect RapidSMS, DevTrac, and EduTrac information to MORES/L3M data from UNICEF in 3 countries
8) Document code
DURATION OF CONTRACT AND DUTY STATION
6 months
Consultant will share his time between Global Pulse New York Headquarters and UNICEF New York Headquarters as needed.
Consultant may be asked to travel to a Country Office.
QUALIFICATIONS AND EDUCATION
• Master’s degree in computer science, mathematics, applied mathematics, information technology, software development, software engineering, computer software engineering, or other related field. Three years of relevant work experience and a bachelor’s degree can be used in lieu of a relevant higher degree
• Experience with open source databases (MySQL, couchDB, etc.)
• Familiarity with open source technology
• Familiarity with AWS, Hive, map/reduce.
• Ability to work across the stack
• Experience with Python, Django, Rails, Node, Javascript and others
• Ability to work in a team and in a diverse work environment
• Experience with processing large amounts of information and synthesizing it
• Fluency in English
PAYMENT
Salary commensurate with experience.
Monthly payment based on outputs to deliverables, certified upon monthly review and report with supervisor.
UNICEF recourse in case of unsatisfactory performance:
Payment will only be made for work satisfactorily completed and accepted by UNICEF.
TO APPLY
Send Resume/CV, Cover Letter and 2-3 samples of work or code on Github or another site to unicef.jobs@gmail.com with subject line: Tower Project Developer by January 10, 2014
For questions, please email unicef.jobs@gmail.com with subject line TOWER PROJECT QUERY
