System Engineer (Data Centre), CHIS2 at African Development Bank - AfDB

Reference: ADB/19/194
Location: Abidjan, Cote D'ivoire
Grade: PL6
Position N°: 50000557

The Complex

• The Vice-Presidency, Human Resources and Corporate Services (CHVP) Complex ensures the delivery of efficient, people-centered, client-oriented, corporate services to ensure overall institutional effectiveness in all aspects of the Bank’s corporate services.
• The Complex leads efforts to ensure the competitiveness of the Bank as the employer of choice and is responsible for providing leadership in the formulation and implementation of Bank’s strategies on people, IT, general services and institutional procurements, language services, business continuity, and health and safety strategies.

The Hiring Department/Division

• The Corporate IT Services Department (CHIS) is mandated by the Bank to deliver the best possible IT services for Bank staff, and help achieve the results that will get the Bank closer to accomplishing its development goals.
• The principal mission of the CHIS.2 division is to ensure that the IT infrastructure of the Bank fits the needs of the Institution and functions in an efficient and cost effective manner to support the bank’s operations.
• The Bank’s infrastructure consisting of high end servers, storage and data protection system supports applications, such as SAP based ERP, BI, financial risk, email, content management, etc.

The Position

• The main responsibility of the Data Center Engineer is to ensure minimal disruption of critical systems and oversee Data Centre operations, hardware maintenance, administration of servers and storage infrastructure

Duties and Responsibilities
Under the supervision of the Division Manager, the incumbent will:

• Oversee all aspects of data centre operations including:
• Racking, cabling, server builds, hardware inventory and maintenance, manage vendors to ensure installed systems are architected and performing properly, maintain and test disaster plan.
• Install, configure and test operating systems, application and system management tools.
• Design and perform server and security audits, backup procedures, and other recovery processes in accordance with the Bank’s disaster recovery and business continuity strategies.
• Implement and manage productivity tools to maintain proactive alerting on IT Infrastructure and services performance and availability.
• Maintain scripts to increase system automation and minimize human errors.
• Service requests, problems and incidents logged through the bank IT service Desk within established SLAs.
• Timely communication to stakeholders during incidents and problems management.
• Provide reports with purpose of improving the IT services.
• Contribute to the development of standard operating procedures (SOP) required to run IT infrastructure operations in a mission critical environment.
• Provide support to developers during application development life cycle in a framework of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.
• Contribute to the preparation of RFPs with technical requirements.
• The bank’s security policies and audit recommendations implementation for operating systems and applications.
• Perform any other duty assigned by the division manager.

Selection Criteria

• Hold at least a Master's Degree in Computer Science or related business fields
• Technology vendors' certifications on systems or storage implementation and administration is a plus.
• Certification such as ITIL (v3).
• Have a minimum of four (4) years of IT and business industry work experience, with at least 3 years of experience in the IT System engineering area.
• Experience of working in a large or similar multilateral institution and complex environment.
• Proven experience with systems planning, security principles, and general operating systems administration best practices
• Solid experience in performance tuning techniques of Operating Systems (CPU, Memory and I/O bottlenecks) and application stacks (Application and web servers).
• Working experience in setting-up and maintaining a highly available and mission critical application architecture (clustering, Load balancing etc.).
• Working experience in setup and maintaining a Disaster Recovery environment for Business Continuity.
• Scripting skills (e.g., Shell, Python, PowerShell etc.).
• Good knowledge of SAN protocols (FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS etc.).
• Proven skills in installing, configuring and troubleshooting UNIX /Linux or Windows based environments.
• Skills in installing, configuring and optimizing one of the major virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, PowerVM).
• Solid networking knowledge (OSI network layers, TCP/IP).
• Excellent problem solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Able to prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.
• Advanced ability to communicate effectively verbally and in writing.
• Ability to communicate ideas in both technical and user-friendly language
• Strong customer service orientation.
• Ability to work in a collaborative environment.
• Demonstrate flexibility (e.g., redeployment, off-hour setup requests, etc.)
• Competence in the use of standard software used in the Bank such as Word, Excel, SAP etc.
• Ability to communicate effectively (written and oral) in English or French, preferably with a working knowledge of the other.