General Information
Type of contract
Short-term contract, which may be extended to up to 36 months subject to individual performance and organisational needs
Contract end date
30.06.2023
Who can apply?
EU nationals working for national central banks of the ESCB, international governmental organisations or other employers performing central banking or banking supervision tasks within the framework of the Eurosystem
Salary
F/G (bracket 2 - step 1) full time monthly net salary: €8,039 plus benefits, for further information see
what we offer.
Working time
Full time
Place of work
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Closing date
25.04.2022
Your team
You will join the Prudential Domain Services Division in the Directorate General Information Systems. We are currently seeking a Senior IT Application Development Expert to be responsible for the service coordination of a bespoke IT system, the Securities Financing Transactions Data Store (SFTDS), which is a single shared data store for the ECB, the European Systemic Risk Board and seven national central banks, and was set up to enhance capabilities in market finance monitoring and financial stability analysis.
As part of the SFTDS service team, you will manage all new development, maintenance and operations activities related to the service, which is currently maintained by an external service provider. You will also be tasked with developing unique, user-friendly and innovative solutions that are central to the ECB’s strategy.
Our technology stack at present consists of XML, Spark, Scala, Hive, Impala, Oracle, HDFS, CA Automic Workload Automation and PowerShell. The SFTDS is hosted on the ECB’s Hadoop data platform, DISC (Data Intelligence Service Centre), which is currently being migrated to the cloud. As a dependent service, and in line with the ECB’s strategy, the SFTDS will also be moved to the cloud. The full technology stack is currently being reassessed. In brief, the SFTDS collects large XML files containing multidimensional data, flattens these data into a simple data model, enriches the data with other referential data sources, computes data quality indicators and finally stores the data in HDFS.
We are committed to ensuring our users have the best possible user experience, as well as to keeping our IT systems secure and protected by building and running our services in accordance with Agile and DevOps practices.
The ECB is an inclusive employer and we strive to reflect the diversity of the population we serve. We encourage you to apply irrespective of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, race, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or other characteristics.
Your role
As SFTDS service coordinator you will be the technical lead for your team and will:
- maintain the existing SFTDS service, managing a team of external service providers to ensure delivery of a backlog of work items;
- prepare and host quarterly service steering group meetings with various stakeholders and monthly user group meetings with SFTDS customers;
- devise a strategy for migrating the SFTDS service, and its sister service EMIR, to the cloud (AWS or Azure), including:
- embedding a DevOps working model and implementing a full CI/CD toolchain;
- identifying strategic technical debt and providing cost/benefit analyses to eliminate and prioritise solutions in line with the product roadmap;
- liaising with stakeholders in other divisions to ensure technical compliance with ECB-wide standards.
We are seeking a candidate for this role who demonstrates the potential for growth, and we support the selected candidate in their future development of the required knowledge, skills or competencies.
The position offers you excellent opportunities to explore ongoing technological innovation in the financial industry, particularly in the field of securities financing transactions across the euro area. You will also have the chance to better your understanding of practices such as DevOps and of cloud technologies. You will be part of a multicultural team that strives for continuous innovation to make a positive impact on the lives of European citizens.
Qualifications, experience and skills
Essential:
- a master’s degree or equivalent in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics or another relevant field (click here for details on degree equivalences);
- in addition to the above, at least seven years of hands-on experience as a professional software engineer working on complex bespoke applications/systems;
- proven experience of fully migrating a legacy service to a CI/CD toolchain;
- proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language;
- a working knowledge of relational database systems and the ability to write complex queries;
- strong customer orientation skills and the ability to manage stress;
- excellent analytical, drafting and presentation skills, and the ability to present complex functional and/or technical topics clearly to internal and external audiences;
- an advanced (C1) command of English and an intermediate (B1) command of at least one other official language of the EU, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Desired:
- experience in agile software development;
- experience in analysing and optimising the performance of applications, including underlying SQL queries;
- a working knowledge of HDFS;
- hands-on experience with any flavour of Linux;
- hands-on experience with monitoring (CheckmK or similar) and log processing (ELK or similar);
- hands-on experience with a major cloud provider.
You engage collaboratively with others. You pursue team goals and learn willingly from other people’s diverse perspectives. You signal any need for change by explaining it and proposing alternative solutions. You analyse complex information effectively and can evaluate different views to arrive at solutions. You know and anticipate stakeholder needs.
You are motivated to be part of our team and to develop and use your skills and competencies to achieve the objectives of this position.
Working modalities
To enable the Division to maintain its business continuity capability, you will occasionally be expected to perform work during non-standard working hours and work at the ECB’s standby sites.
Further information
The contract(s) offered will be short-term ESCB/IO, the appointment being for 12 months as of the exact starting date of the selected person, extendable to up to 36 months.
For additional information on this specific vacancy, you can speak to the hiring manager, Maria Frantzi, on +49 (0) 69 1344 4121 between 09:00 and 10:00 on Thursday, 14 April.
Application and selection process
The recruitment process for this position will be conducted remotely and it will include an interview.
If you are not selected for this position but are still considered suitable, you will be placed on a reserve list (
see step 4 of how we hire), from which you might be considered for similar positions within the ECB.
