Senior Systems Engineer

NATO offers you more than a job. It gives you a mission: building peace and security for one billion people in Europe and North America. The NATO Communications & Information Agency (NCIA) is leading NATO’s Digital Endeavour.  The Senior Systems Engineer will be part of the Command & Control (C2) service line based from The Hague, Netherlands.

Who we are:

NCIA acquire, deploy and defend communications systems for NATO's political decision-makers and Commands; the agency is on the frontlines against cyber-attacks, working closely with governments and industry to prevent future debilitating attacks.

We are NATO’s technology and cyber leaders, helping NATO Nations to communicate and work together in smarter ways. Our work is challenging and meaningful, and you will develop and apply your expertise as part of a dynamic international team of civilian and military professionals.

The role:

C2 are accountable for planning and executing all lifecycle management activities (design, transition and operations) for Joint/Maritime/Land C2 services.  The Technical Architect will be part of the Enabling Services group who are responsible for the full lifecycle support of the Joint COI (Community of Interest) systems and for C2 interoperability and standardisation. This includes responsibility for current operational systems including Joint Tactical Chat (JChat), Network Interoperable Real-time Information Services (NIRIS) as well as the acquisition of future Joint C2 systems. The branch is also responsible for interoperability between C2 systems, including work on Tactical Data Link (TDL) systems.

The Senior Systems Engineer will be working as part of a team whose core competencies and expertise are highly technical and diverse within the areas of information exchange, interoperability frameworks & standards, (tactical) data links and data distribution, metadata, data quality and data lake technologies implemented in NATO IT services and deployed in the enterprise.

This role will Perform analysis, design, implementation and maintenance of authorized software changes, related applications software and the integration/tailoring of vendor supplied components, following established procedures for quality, configuration control, testing, documentation and security.  The Senior Systems Engineer will lead the transition of systems and services to the operational environment by providing expeditious technical support services to the NATO Functional Area Services including emergency troubleshooting and on-site assistance (at NATO and national sites) to ensure key information systems remain operational.

What do we offer?

• Genuinely meaningful work as part of the most successful alliance in history
• Initial three year contract with competitive monthly tax-free salary of 6,117 p/m and household & children’s allowances
• Privileges for expatriate staff including expatriation and education allowances (where appropriate) and additional home leave
• Excellent private health insurance scheme
• Generous annual leave of 30 days plus official holidays
• Retirement Pension Plan

About you:

You easily establish good relationship and are able to relate to people at all levels.  You produce new ideas, approaches and insights to deliver innovate solutions to problems.  Able to adapt to changing circumstances you can tolerate ambiguity, accept new ideas and change initiatives.  In addition to accepting and tackling demanding goals, you have the following experience with:

• Operation, administration, testing and maintenance of software for modern IT systems in a networked, distributed and production application environment;
• Operating systems that are currently used for modern information systems (familiar with Microsoft Windows, experience with Linux/Apache a plus);
• Software Application development and database debugging and troubleshooting;
• Databases for querying and analysing data integrations;
• Support of applications based on object-oriented and structured programming languages;
• Relational databases management including backups, archiving and replication;
• Maintenance or knowledge of all supporting components such as monitoring, alarming and performance analysis systems;
• Modern digital networking techniques, protocols and standards;
• Data and systems interoperability, interoperability testing standards, procedures and methodologies.
• Career as a developer and/or software tester during all phases of the development lifecycle;
• Knowledge with automated testing in projects environments with experience of writing test documents and reports
• IT Service Management and tools;
• Disaster Recovery, Audit activities, support process reviews/enhancements;
• Modern concepts for software configuration management and quality assurance;
• Security cross-domain information exchange methodologies, tools and techniques;
• Command and Control concepts, processes and tools;
• Systems support and maintenance in the NATO or similar defence or industry environment;
• Formal ITIL foundation certification;