Space for Early Warning in Africa – SEWA is a project funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General International Partnerships (DG INTPA) to “enhance the capacity to produce and deliver space-based services and applications, data and information, for early warning systems related to hazardous weather or climate events”.

EUMETSAT’s activities under this project ease access to and visualisation of satellite meteorological data by African users involved in providing Early Warning information. EUMETSAT supports the establishment of regional capacities to generate satellite-based products for immediate forecasting (nowcasting) and further applications. There is also a significant training element to this project. The project also support four African regional centres that directly access data from the EUMETSAT and partner satellites to support forecasting.

The EUMETSAT activities will be implemented in close cooperation with key partners, notably the African Union Commission and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

The main responsibility of this post is to provide technical support for the implementation of the cloud technologies that the African partners will use. This post is in the Digital Solutions and SAF Division – who is responsible for all EUMETSAT cloud services and digital solutions.

This post is limited until December 2028, with no possibility for extension.

Duties

• Design, develop and maintain the cloud solution required for SEWA;
• Coordinate the activities to ensure end-to-end cloud services provision for SEWA, including the technical budgets, the technical requirements and interaction with supporting industry;
• Promote African ownership of the cloud environment and support the African partners to understand cloud infrastructure and approaches for their own future planning;
• Support the on-boarding of new users and projects, by providing expert support in terms of usage of cloud infrastructure and the related services;

• Provide technical expertise to the users on the usage of the established SEWA cloud services, to ensure a maximum knowledge transfer;
• Cooperate with SEWA stakeholders with EUMETSAT and other partners such as ECMWF and the experts from DG-INTPA;
• Automate routine processes and monitoring using industry standard application programming interfaces (API);
• Contribute to the support of the direct satellite data access activities as part of the SEWA agreement;
• Manage corresponding industrial support contracts.

Skills and Experience

• Practical experience with hybrid on-premises and off-premises cloud infrastructure;
• Applied expertise in cloud infrastructure architecture and implementations;
• Experience of working creatively with users – from problem to solution;
• Hands-on experience with private and public cloud services including Kubernetes;
• Excellent troubleshooting skills, up-to-date knowledge of industry trends;
• Applied hands-on experience with APIs, automation and orchestration using Python, Ruby or Java;
• Excellent organisational and communication skills, pro-active and team-player attitude and the ability to work autonomously with a minimum of supervision under high workloads.
• The core values of EUMETSAT are integrity, excellence, open mindedness, collaboration and empowerment – they are all relevant to this role.

Following additional experience in the areas listed below will be considered as strong advantage:

• Computer systems maintenance and operations 24/7;
• Hands-on experience with various distributed processing frameworks;
• Ground Stations for Earth Observations space mission;
• Data Processing in scientific environment;
• Knowledge of formal system & service development, verification and validation;
• Agile methodology;
• Cloud native applications, JupyterHub, AI/ML, ELK stack, FaaS and serverless;
• Knowledge of cloud technologies and cloud services available on the European market.