Consultancy: Senior Full Stack Developer, Office of Innovation, Learning Innovation Hub, Helsinki, Finland, 12 Months, Remote

UNICEF's Office of Innovation in Helsinki, is looking for a consultant who will work as a Senior Full-Stack Developer. As a Senior Full-Stack Developer, you will lead the expansion of the Learning Cabinet platform, incorporating new features that will revolutionize how educational decision-makers and partners find and compare EdTech solutions. Your expertise will shape the future of global education by ensuring personalized access to tools that drive positive learning outcomes for children worldwide.

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships, and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

For every child...innovate

UNICEF’s Office of Innovation is driving transformative solutions for global education challenges. We are developing The Learning Cabinet—a pioneering web platform that connects decision-makers in education particularly in the Global South with curated list of EdTech tools tailored to their unique contexts. By providing a vetted list the safest, most impactful, and scalable tools together with personalized recommendations, the education decision-makers will be empowered to address the learning crisis more efficiently. To achieve this vision, we seek a full time Senior Full-Stack Developer to build the future of EdTech discovery. 

The Learning Innovation Hub within OOI has recently been established in Helsinki with the mission to radically transform education around the world by making it a wonderful adventure for every child. The Hub contributes to UNICEF’s Reimagine Education initiative and has the bold ambition to become a global “home for the architects of the future of learning” and help solve the learning crisis as well as imagine and develop alternative learning futures for all children. 

How can you make a difference?

As a Senior Full-Stack Developer, you will lead the expansion of the Learning Cabinet platform, incorporating new features that will revolutionize how educational decision-makers and partners find and compare EdTech solutions. Your expertise will shape the future of global education by ensuring personalized access to tools that drive positive learning outcomes for children worldwide. 

Your main responsibilities will be: 

You'll join a tight-knit, agile team of passionate professionals working remotely to enhance the Learning Cabinet platform. Collaborate closely with an experienced senior developer, a UX/UI designer, and a product manager. Your role extends beyond coding; you'll actively contribute to brainstorming and shaping the most effective solutions for our users. We thrive in an open environment where ideas flow freely, decisions are made swiftly, and iterations happen rapidly. Expect active communication, shared enthusiasm, and a dose of fun along the way. 

To further develop an existing Learning Cabinet platform with at least the following functionalities:  

LLM-Driven Recommendation Engine: 

Develop an insight generator using OpenAI (or equivalent) to provide personalized suggestions based on user data. 

Support for EdTech Tool Evaluators: 

Create a system for EdTech evaluators to assess tools, submit reviews, and provide feedback, while maintaining confidentiality and supporting multiple profiles. 

Automated Profile Update Notification System: 

Implement an automated reminder system that prompts EdTech firms to annually update their profiles via email or platform messages to ensure data accuracy. 

Peer Review System: 

Enable peer reviews from decision-makers with similar experiences and provide connections to experts for insights and advice. 

Support for Feature Enhancements: 

Enhance key features like onboarding, user profiles, and search, with improvements aligned to project needs and evolving timelines. 

Please find attached the full ToR (Terms of Reference) with related information:  IC TOR Learning Cabinet Senior Web Developer 2 (1).pdf

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

Required qualifications:

• Over eight (8) years of professional hands-on coding experience with Drupal as a full-stack (back-end and front-end) developer. 
• At least ten (10) years of professional hands-on coding experience with PHP, hooks, SQL, performance optimization, continuous integration (Travis, Jenkins...etc.), HTML/JavaScript/Twig/AJAX/React and working with 3rd party libraries such as selectric, date range picker. 
• Mastery in building responsive interfaces using CSS, SCSS, and other relevant frontend technologies. 
• Experience working with Pattern Lab, GULP (build tool) for Drupal. 
• Over five (5) years of experience performing code reviews. 
• Hands on experience with accessibility and SEO. 
• Experience working with design teams on the site design related projects. 
• Good understanding and working experience with atomic design with Figma software. 
• Experience working with Docker/Lando. 
• Experience working with Composer, continuous integration (through Travis or another CI server). 
• Proven experience of building, leading and architecting enterprise level Drupal applications. 
• Ability to perform complex Drupal development tasks, including custom module development. 
• Hands on practice to cover QA test cases creation (e.g. behat tests; visual regression tests (e.g. Backstops)) as part of development work. 
• Experience working with agile methodology (e.g. JIRA, Azure DevOps), version control – Git. 
• Exceptional collaboration skills: ability to work closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders in a global, cross-functional team. 
• To ensure optimal collaboration, it's essential that you can consistently dedicate most of your workday to overlap with the Central European Time (CET) zone. 
• Fluency in English. 

Desired qualifications 

• Headless Drupal development with Next.js. 
• Acquia certification, hands-on exp. with Acquia BLT. 
• Building and deploying serverless applications to production using technologies such as Cloudflare, AWS Lambda, or equivalent, and building CI/CD pipelines. 

Travel:

Travel is expected for a 3-day design sprint / workshop in Helsinki, Finland 

Payment details and further considerations

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.   
• Payments can be structured on a flexible basis, allowing for partial disbursements, such as monthly progress achievements. Partial progress towards deliverables will be measured through agile sprint goals completed in a satisfactory manner and approved by the product manager.  

How to apply:

• Please provide a portfolio with specific examples of the most technically challenging development projects you've undertaken, highlighting the problems you encountered and the innovative solutions you implemented. 

• In the portfolio, share examples of past work where you were primarily responsible for the implementation of the frontend, showcasing your proficiency in creating compelling interfaces. Each project should clearly define what were the areas that you were responsible for. 

• Interested applicant is required to submit a financial proposal with all-inclusive fee.  Please see the financial proposal template.  Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa, travel/health insurance.
• Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.  

  General Terms and Conditions:  

• Please review UNICEF's General Terms and Conditions for Consultants here for important information regarding contract obligations, including medical insurance, SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) vaccination, and income tax requirements. 

 For every Child, you demonstrate…

 UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children, and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks: 

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations, or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.

Contact: For any queries, please contact: swe-ooi-recruitments@unicef.org