Principal Unified Communications Engineer - CHIS3 at African Development Bank - AfDB

Reference: ADB/18/091
Location: Côte d’Ivoire
Grade: PL4
Position N°: 50000589

The Complex

• The Vice-Presidency, Human Resources and Corporate Services 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, information technology, general services and institutional procurements, language services, business continuity and, health and safety strategies.

The Hiring Department/Division

• The Corporate Information Technology Services Department’s mission at the Bank is to align the Information Technology (IT) delivery strategy along with the Bank’s business strategy to increase the organizational effectiveness through efficient use of the Information Systems.
• Under the leadership of the African Development Bank’s Information Systems Director, the Information Technology Systems Department is mandated by the Bank to deliver best possible Information Technology (IT) services for Bank Staff, and help achieve the results that gets the Bank closer to accomplishing its poverty reduction goals in Africa.

The Position

• The Principal Unified Communication Engineer purpose is to be responsible for the strategy, global design, implementation, operation and on-going development of unified communication infrastructure and services to support the requirements and strategy of the Bank’s business.
• The incumbent other objective is to be responsible for the coordination and supervision of the Unified Communication team to provide high quality business services with a strong collaborative team ethic, both within the team and with the wider CIMM team.

Duties and Responsibilities
The key duties and responsibilities of Principal Unified Communication Engineer are to:

• Lead and manage the Unified communications Team, Engineers, Architects and technicians to provide high services quality to the Business with a strong collaborative team ethic and innovative thinking, both within the team and with the wider IT department teams.
• Lead the coordination, control, planning, design, implementation and operation of global Unified Communication infrastructure and services including the video and audio conference, telephony, instant messaging, content sharing, and video streaming.
• Provides guidance and technical expertise in Unified Communication Solution design. Develops strategies and architectures for monitoring network consumption, capacity constraints and trending. Performs system capacity planning to ensure appropriate growth and evolution of systems.
• Prepare the annual work plan for the unified communications activities, assign tasks and projects to unified communication team members with clear objectives and deadlines. Ensure allocation Unified Communications resources and staffing, optimizing resources against clear business priorities.
• Establish proactively business priorities where none are apparent in order to marshal resources effectively in support of the most important priorities.
• Take responsibility for all stages of the life cycle for software/hardware and transmission media development of unified communication systems, including investigation, analysis, specification, design, construction, testing, maintenance, upgrade and migration.
• Performs engineering analysis and provides recommendations to improve performance, increase efficiency and optimize the unified communication infrastructure, management and cost parameters.
• Produce designs and specifications covering objectives, scope, features, facilities, reliability, resilience, constraints (such as performance, resources and cost), hardware, and software environments, main system functions and information flows, traffic volumes, data load and implementation strategies, phasing of development, requirements not met, and alternatives considered.
• Work closely with other departments/organizations and collaborate with other IT staff including the network and telecommunications, system engineers and IT’s security teams to design, implement and maintain the unified communications servers, applications, features and upgrades to meet project goals and ensure operational efficiency and reliability for Unified Communications services.
• Provide clear recommendations for solutions to the Bank’s Business and management problems regarding Unified Communication services.
• Ensure interconnectivity and interoperability of the Bank’s unified communications infrastructures and services with partners.
• Ensure that the Engineering Team analyse and resolve serious faults, taking preventative action to protect the Bank against a reoccurrence of any faults.
• Control usage of established methods, hardware and software tools and procedures used for planning, installing, configuring, commissioning, monitoring and investigating the Unified Communications, and initiates and evaluates improvements.
• Specify user/system interfaces, including reports, validation and error correction procedures, processing rules, access, security and audit controls, recovery routines and contingency procedures.
• Ensure the proactive monitoring of Unified Communications usage and performance, and ensure Unified communication environment that is operational according to service level requirements.
• Ensure the most cost-effective and efficient use of Unified Communications hardware and provision telecommunications services to the business.
• Initiate the procurement procedure, participate actively to the evaluation teams and follow-up the overall procurement process.

Establish, maintain and improve operational best practices and standard operating procedures for deployment, support, and management (monitoring, maintenance, etc.).

• Prepare the annual administrative budget regarding the maintenance and support of existing unified communication infrastructure, and the three-year capital budget plan for the new unified communications projects.
• Work with vendors, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers and telecommunication carriers to ensure the required service quality, resolve incidents and respect the committed Service Level Agreement (SLA) and, interface with technology vendors for equipment servicing, updating and training.
• Maintains usage statistics, issue and repair logs, or other collection/reporting systems.

Selection Criteria
Including desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Hold at least a Master's degree in Computer Science, Telecommunications or similar field.
• Professional Certificate in ITIL and project management
• Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert Lab certified in Voice or Collaboration and Routing and Switching.
• Microsoft and Polycom Certified Solutions Expert – Communications
• Have a minimum of six (6) years of relevant experience in Unified Communications project implementation and operations.
• Extensive working knowledge at Voice and Video standards: SIP, H323, MGW, SBC, ISDN/ PSTN lines configuration and GSM-Gateway, Cisco Voice Gateways/Skype for Business/ VoIP/ Windows/Linux Server operating system environment, implementation and support.
• Working knowledge of network function virtualization, network automation, data center virtualization and firewalls.
• Excellent IT Service Management skills with minimum 6 years of running complex IT Service operation.
• Proven experience in Polycom Real Presence and Skype for Business project management, implementation and operation.
• Proven experience in configuration and troubleshooting  VoIP and video standards, essentially SIP, SDP, H323, RTP, RTCP, TLS Experience in designing and implementing IT Services
• Dynamic and self-motivated to provide better services to the users
• Ability to build and maintain rapport with all users at different levels of the organisation, across Complexes, Divisions and Departments.
• Excellent interpersonal skills coupled with a collaborative style
• Excellent problem solving and troubleshooting skills; ability to triage effectively under pressure.
• Good organizational skills with the ability to prioritize and multi-task.
• Ability to work effectively both independently and within a team.
• Have the ability to effectively transfer and exchange information.
• Have the ability to develop work plan, define priorities and monitor work progress.
• Effective communication (written and oral) in French or English, preferably with a good working knowledge of the other language
• Competences in the use of standard technology packages and Bank's standard software (word, excel, outlook, Power Point, MS Projects, etc...) and SQL database, Python, Linux Operating Systems