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Lead Systems Engineer
UNOPSUnited NationsInformation and Communications TechnologySenior LevelICA - IICA - Regular
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Full Description
**Job Highlight**
This is a rare opportunity to define the technical foundations for a global UN organization at a pivotal moment: UNOPS is actively building AI capabilities, modernising its platforms, and scaling digital solutions across 80+ countries. The position offers significant influence over technology decisions, team leadership, and the adoption of cutting-edge practices like AI-assisted development.
**Job Specific Context**
The Core Systems Engineering (CSE) team designs, builds, and maintains the platforms, APIs, reusable components, and developer tools that power UNOPS digital solutions - from AI applications and integration layers to business systems and project templates. CSE serves as the technical backbone for the AI Centre of Excellence, Business Applications, and IT Operations teams, providing them with the building blocks they need to deliver their own solutions.
**Role Purpose**
Under the supervision of the CIO, the Lead Systems Engineer will lead the Core Systems Engineering team, setting technical direction and standards for the platforms, APIs, components, and tools that underpin UNOPS digital solutions. This role has full accountability for the delivery of platforms, standards and frameworks for all digital products across the organization, including specialized AI products for HQ and the field.
**Functions / Key Results Expected**
1. Team Leadership and Engineering Standards
• Provide technical leadership to a team of Systems Architects and Developers, setting engineering standards and ensuring consistent, high-quality delivery across all CSE workstreams.
• Define and enforce the technical standards, coding practices, and architectural patterns that all CSE-built solutions must follow.
• Make technology decisions for the CSE stack (languages, frameworks, cloud services, and tools), balancing innovation with maintainability and organisational risk.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop team members, building technical capability and ensuring the team stays current with relevant technologies.
• Guide the adoption of AI-assisted development tools and practices within the team, ensuring responsible use and measurable productivity gains.
2. Platform Development and Management
• Plan and manage the CSE engineering roadmap, balancing new platform development, technical debt reduction, and support commitments to the AI Center of Excellence, IT Operations and Business Applications teams.
• Own the design and delivery of CSE's core outputs: APIs, reusable components, integration layers, AI application templates, project templates, and developer tools.
• Define cloud hosting architectures and deployment specifications for CSE solutions, providing the Infrastructure team with clear standards for automation, scaling, and orchestration.
• Design and oversee CI/CD pipelines, branching strategies, and application deployment workflows, including AIOps-specific processes for model versioning, experimentation tracking, drift monitoring, and retraining.
• Ensure all CSE-built platforms and components are production-ready, well-documented, and designed for handover to the teams that will operate and extend them.
• Manage the developer experience: ensure project templates, starter kits, CI/CD pipelines, and development tooling enable the team to deliver reliably and efficiently.
3. Coordination and Governance
• Partner with the AI Center of Excellence Lead to prioritise field requirements and shape the CSE build priorities.
• Coordinate with the IT Infrastructure team to align on hosting environments, infrastructure dependencies, capacity requirements, and production support arrangements, ensuring CSE solutions and deployment pipelines run reliably in production.
• Coordinate with the Business Applications team to ensure CSE-built components and platforms serve their delivery needs.
• Establish and maintain engineering governance, including architecture review processes, technical debt tracking, and security-by-design practices.
• In close alignment with the CISO, ensure all CSE developments and outputs comply with cybersecurity standards, data protection requirements, and cloud governance policies
• Report to ITG leadership on CSE delivery progress, technical risks, capacity, and resource needs.
**Skills**
Cloud Computing, Systems Engineering, Technical Leadership, Software Development Lifecycle, Coding, Software Architecture
**Education Requirements**
Required
• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related technical discipline, or equivalent or related fields with 9 years of relevant experience OR
• Master’s degree (or equivalent) in any of the above or related fields with 7 years of relevant experience is required
Desired
• Kubernetes certification (CKA or CKAD)
• Professional Cloud Architect Certification (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
**Experience Requirements**
Required
• Relevant experience is work in software engine
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