Through the Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability (RIIS), Digital Earth Africa seeks a highly qualified and capable Africa-based technical advisor (whose role title will be Platform Lead) with experience managing Amazon Web Services architecture. Therefore, an ideal candidate for the role will use their strong technical background, good interpersonal relations, and skilful stakeholder engagement and collaboration to shape and maintain the direction and development of DE Africa’s platform infrastructure and data pipelines.
As a Platform Lead at Digital Earth Africa, the incumbent will manage the organisation’s operational functions. This role requires a deep understanding of software engineering principles and big data processing and analysis. Furthermore, the successful candidate will be instrumental in building future capability, liaising with existing technical staff, and managing and maintaining the technology platform supporting DE Africa and DE Africa Products. In addition, these tasks will include building and growing long-term relationships and fostering collaboration with internal and external African and international stakeholders to successfully deliver DE Africa operations.
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 internal and external technical achievements 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 knowledge 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
- The ideal candidate must be from Africa.
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
How to Apply
- Should you be interested in this post and meet the above requirements, please send your detailed CV and cover letter to hiring@riis.africa
- Closing date: 2 August 2024
About Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) and The Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability (RIIS)
Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) is a pan-African programme that has become the world’s largest operational Open Data Cube platform, which is used to access and analyse decades of satellite imagery specific to Africa’s terrestrial and coastal resources. Similarly, DE Africa translates freely available Earth Observation (EO) satellite data into ready-to-use insights about the continent’s environmental conditions. Such insights enable African governments, NGOs, businesses, and individuals to make more informed decisions about soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, deforestation, desertification, water quality, and changes in human settlements.
DE Africa is currently hosted by the Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability (RIIS), a leading innovation and development-focused advisory firm in Africa. In addition, RIIS’s work in the space sector focuses on growing the emerging African space ecosystem by implementing and supporting continental capacity-building programs, of which DE Africa is one.
The DE Africa Programme Management Office (PMO) is located at the RIIS offices in Rosebank, Johannesburg. However, DE Africa staff are located and work remotely from several African countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana and Sri Lanka. Furthermore, they collaborate with multiple Implementing Partners across African countries, including Kenya, Ghana, Niger, South Africa, and a broader team located in Australia and the US.
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