DevOps / Backend Developer D-Team at Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)

Job Identification: 2735
Location: Remote
Job Schedule: Full time
Job Category: Information Technology and Systems

Context

• NRC believes in a world where the rights of displaced and vulnerable persons are protected during a crisis. We do this through our programmes, where we provide assistance to meet immediate humanitarian needs, prevent further displacement and contribute to durable solutions.
• At the root of our programmes are our solid technical expertise and specific sectorial knowledge aiming for the highest possible quality, whether in stand-alone or integrated approaches.
• Data and technology is the fuel for decision-making, process improvement and analysis within the humanitarian sector.
• We are looking for an experienced, high-energy, hands-on colleague to be our DevOps / Backend Developer who will be responsible for developing and maintaining technical solutions, which will provide direct benefit to our staff and the people that we serve.
• The main task will be to support the creation of an optimal development experience for various digital initiatives with a solid platform in Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure.
• The initial focus will be to contribute to the ongoing development of existing NRC infrastructure and improve our infrastructure’s resilience, security, performance, and cost-effectiveness.
• Working on some fast-moving and dynamic projects the position will directly influence NRC’s ability to improve the lives of millions of people in an ever-changing world.

What you will do

• You will work closely with other members of NRC’s D Team (Digital Transformation Team) to improve NRC infrastructure (Backbone)’s resilience, security, performance, and automation opportunities.
• You will provide developers with useful tooling to develop, deploy The position will also contribute to providing strategic direction, development / security standards, DevOps training for other technical staff to improve and leverage overall development practice in NRC. Some of your day-to-day tasks will include:
  • Maintain and up keeping of NRC’s Kubernetes (Staging + Production) clusters – hosting global applications, including data backup and restore functions;
  • Write manifests and manage automated deployment of application stacks to NRC’s Kubernetes clusters;
  • Setup and maintain automated CI / CD workflows (Continuous integration & continuous delivery);
  • Prepare technical documentation and specifications on a regular basis;
  • Create unit test plans; contribute to functional/UAT test plans as needed;
  • Provide technical oversight of external consultants’ work that includes custom design and assist in handover of these to NRC (to ensure long-term ownership);
  • Support the recruitment of future NRC technical staff and support the evaluation of external technical consultants;
  • Perform data migration and other integration work in a safe and controlled environment - validating these actions before going to live (production) systems;
  • Communicate and represent NRC with partners, consultants, and service providers at a technical level.

What You Will Bring

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related subjects, or demonstrable expertise in the field;
• Advanced analytical skills and problem-solving attitude;
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills;
• Capable of operating in an "Agile" environment and high levels of uncertainty;
• Comfortable working remotely within a geographically distributed team;
• Fluency in written and spoken English. Other languages are an asset;
• Working knowledge of automating infrastructure in a cloud environment, preferably Azure;
• Previous experience in working with infrastructure as code(Terraform) and service mesh (Istio): Ability to comfortably use and configure Istio Service Mesh features, such as:
  • Authorization Policies
  • Ingress and Egress gateways (with or without SNI proxy-)
  • Request Authentication Policies
  • Virtual services, Gateways
• Knowledge and implementation of containerization and container orchestration: We use Docker, Kubernetes, Kustomize, etc;
• Preferable skills in Cloud security and cloud network;
• Application operations knowledge (Backups, monitoring, deployment) will come in handy;
• Knowledge of one or more programming language (Go, Python, etc) and/or scripting language would be desired.

What Makes this Position Attractive?

• You will collaborate with a passionate and experienced international team doing incredibly meaningful work advocating for the rights of people forced to flee.
• Our pay is competitive based on the sectoral standard and we are committed to your growth.  
• You get to work on a challenging and exciting opportunity that will provide direct benefit to NRC staff (7000 and counting) and beneficiaries (11 million and counting)
• A 1-year full-time contract (possibly extended) with Berlin as the preferred duty station but we are also open to considering other duty stations where NRC has an office (we support remote collaboration);