Digital Earth Africa seeks a highly qualified and capable technical advisor (whose role title will be Digital Earth Africa, Platform Lead), with experience managing Amazon Web Services architecture. Our ideal candidate will use their strong technical background and good interpersonal relations, alongside skilful stakeholder engagement and collaboration, to shape and maintain the direction and development of DE Africa’s platform infrastructure and data pipelines.
Successful management of DE Africa’s operational functions requires a Platform Lead with an understanding of software engineering principles, and Big Data processing and analysis. This combination of skills is essential to build future capability, liaise with existing technical staff and generally to manage and maintain the technology platform supporting DE Africa and DE Africa Products.
It includes working and growing long-term relationships and fostering collaboration with internal and external stakeholders on the African continent and internationally to deliver DE Africa operations successfully.
Key Responsibilities
The Platform Lead will be accountable for delivering the below outcomes, either directly or by delegating to new and existing resources.
- Recommend strategic directions for maintaining, developing and sustaining Digital Earth Africa’s platform infrastructure and data services;
- Coordinate with the DE Africa Science, Capacity Development, Communication, and Operations teams to deliver high quality outcomes and impact
- Establish and implement effective data governance to manage the availability, usability, integrity, and security of DE Africa platform infrastructure and data, including internal data standards, data usage policies, and cost monitoring;
- Oversee a small team of software engineers, front-end developers and DevOps engineers, including external and international contractors;
- Maintain and develop the platform infrastructure, including managing and delivering web services and capabilities for Digital Earth Africa;
- Manage operational data pipelines for Digital Earth Africa with sustained access to open data from international providers.
- Manage interactions with Amazon Web Services and other Digital Earth Africa infrastructure and data processing partners;
- Deliver a reliable platform and operational data pipelines to government, industry and internal stakeholders;
- Provide user support services;
- Communicate technical achievements both internally and externally to a broad community of users and developers.
Essential Requirements
- 2+ years of experience in a similar senior position
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principals, preferably within Terraform or CloudFormation
- Strong understanding of Cloud computing concepts (specifically within the AWS ecosystem)
- Strong understanding of Service Orchestration and Service Discovery, Kubernetes
- Experience in utilising monitoring and logging tools, CloudWatch, CloudTrail Unix-based shell scripting
- Experience with Python scripting and serverless workloads, AWS Lambda
- Understanding of cybersecurity frameworks and common security practices
- Availability to work across multiple time zones
Desirable Requirements
- A master's qualification in computer technology
- GitOps & DevOps using Atlassian and Microsoft/Github products
- Experience using common scripting and mark-up languages, YAML, JSON, Markdown, PlantUML
- Experience managing SDLC using Agile methodology and supporting tools
Closing date: 2 August 2024
Should you be interested in this post and meet the above requirements, please send your your detailed CV and cover letter to hiring@riis.africa
The Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability (RIIS) is currently the interim host for the Digital Earth Africa PMO and will be facilitating the application process.