2025-0302 Systems Engineering Services (NS) REMOTE - 2 Sep

Introduction:

NCIA, as the main ICT service provider in NATO, is the main technical entity providing subject matter expertise to support Allied Command Transformation (ACT) Science and Technology (S&T) Programme of Work (PoW) and relevant exercises in 2025. NCIA Chief Technology Office (CTO) Innovating Team is looking for a Contractor who will provide day-to-day technical support to in the area of cloud automation technology and exercises in 2025.

Objectives:

NCI Agency is contributing to the ACT's S&T experimentation participate in designing and automating the deployment of multiple NATO C2 applications in a combined public and private cloud environment. The Contractor will have the opportunity to implement CI/CD best practices and automation in a multi-cloud context leveraging an open source stack. The candidate is also expected to influence the deployment and automation strategy and implement their ideas with a focus on abstracting the infrastructure and platform services from application developers.

Scope of Work:

Under the direction / guidance of the NCIA Point of Contact or delegated staff, the Contractor will perform the following activities:

• Support NCI Agency in the NATO Programmes of Work with ACT in the area of cloud automation technologies.
• Provide technical support to NATO exercises and associated events organized by NATO bodies and the Agency.
• Collaborate to the development of software automation code using Terraform, Ansible and/or Helm for the events.
• Perform cloud administration tasks on an AWS account based on GitOps, and on multiple Microsoft Azure tenants.
• Collaborate to the planning and organisational aspects for the upcoming experimentations.
• Participate to the bi-weekly project meetings held in the NCI Agency in The Hague either online or face to face.

The Contractor will be part of a team and will provide the service using an Agile and iterative approach during multiple sprints. Each sprint is planned for a duration of 1 week. The content and scope of each sprint will be agreed during the sprint-planning meeting.
 
Requirements:

• The contractor is required to hold or be able to obtain a valid NATO SECRET security clearance

Qualification:
The support services under this SOW require systems engineering skills with the following qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field. At least 2 years of relevant professional experience.
• Deep knowledge and demonstrable experience in IT automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools in cloud environments, such as Ansible, Terraform, and Helm.
• Experience with containerization technologies and orchestrators, such as Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes/OpenShift.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices, tools and methodologies.
• Proven experience with Linux and Windows system administration.
• Strong knowledge of one or more cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI.
• Deep understanding of cloud architecture principles particularly in setting up landing zones and cloud network design
• Excellent understanding of networking concepts and cloud networking technologies.
• Experience with cryptographic elements: Key management (PKI), encryption algorithms (AES) and encryption in transit (TLS) Documentation skills, with the ability to create detailed technical specifications and architecture diagrams.

Preferred qualifications:

• Extensive knowledge of AWS or Microsoft Azure. Related Professional Cloud Certifications are desirable.
• Working in an international environment comprising both military and civilian elements.
• Experience in Cloud FinOps and resource optimization.
• Experience in migrating workloads (and re-architecting for cloud)
• Configure and maintain network security controls, including firewalls, VPNs, and access control lists (ACLs).
• Implement and manage cryptographic elements like PKI, digital certificates, and encryption algorithms (AES).
• Experience in multi-cloud deployments and hybrid environments