Requirement Title: Infrastructure and Platform Support as a Service
Location of Performance: 100% On-site at NCIA The Hague, NETHERLANDS
Cost Not to Exceed
2026 BASE: 17 cycles, (Not to Exceed) NTE € 3,123.00 / cycle total Not to Exceed (NTE) € 53,091.00
2026 OPTION: 22 cycles, (Not to Exceed) NTE € 3,123.00/ cycle total Not to Exceed (NTE) € 68,706.00
2027, 2028 options
Period of performance: BASE period: 23 February 2026
Evaluation Methodology: Lowest Priced Technically Compliant
Required Security Clearance: Cosmic T#p S#cret
Special Terms and Conditions: N/A
Technical Proposal
Bidders shall submit a proposal (all three parts in one (1) document) clearly providing the
following information:
Cover page with the following information:
- Company name,
- Name(s) of assigned contractor's personnel(s),
- Role(s) assigned to each contractor's personnel(s).
activities).
Evidence of successfully delivering one to three projects of similar scope to the statement of work within the last five years. Each evidence should demonstrate proof of performance and be comparable in size and scope to the requirements of this role. Additionally, ensure to include a detailed case study that highlight the Purpose, Objective, Output and Outcome (PO3) mentioned in the table (Annex B). Evidence should display the ability to manage and deliver Data Warehousing and Dashboard Expertise by following customer requirements.
CVs and attestations of the proposed contractor's personnel(s) for the project.
Introduction:
The NATO Information and Communication Agency (NCI Agency) located in The Hague, The Netherlands, is the Assurance Solutions Authority for NATO. In fulfilment of this responsibility, the Assurance Solutions Branch (ASB) of the Chief Quality Office is seeking a service contract to engage an IaaS and PaaS Engineer with proven expertise in
implementing, maintaining and supporting infrastructure and platform services. The scope includes practical work with datacentre elements; developing and maintaining infrastructure as code; operating and maintaining infrastructure and platform services; troubleshooting and supporting service requests and defects; monitoring services and providing professional guidance in improving and evolving the service catalogue.
Objectives:
The objectives of this engagement are to:
- Ensure Service Availability: Perform preventive and reactive activities for assuring that all the infrastructure and platform services are available for all the Assurance Solutions Branch's stakeholders.
- Enforce NCIA security policies: Align all ASB systems and services with the guidance and policies of NCI Agency and NATO. Collaborate with other NCI Agency colleagues and sections for ensuring that the platforms and systems are in line with their security accreditation. Support security accreditation activities in relation to ASB's platforms and/or systems.
- Maintain and improve the services: In line with the lifecycle and patch/feature release schedule of the resources composing the ASB infrastructure and platforms, perform regular maintenance, including updates, patches, and bug fixes as needed to prevent disruptions. Collaborate with the service delivery managers and their teams to plan and implement periodic maintenance schedules, with reduced impact on the stakeholders. Participate in the implementation of new features, services and tools, assess their feasibility and integrate them with the existent elements.
- Reduce human mistakes: Develop, maintain and improve infrastructure as code for the deployment and configuration of core systems and services. Adopt and support a "dry code" initiative and strive for less manual intervention. Maintain, operate and improve automation, versioning and orchestration tooling.
- Perform datacentre maintenance: Hardware inspections and replacements as part of scheduled or non-scheduled maintenance activities. Verification of cabling, patch panels, connectors and cooling equipment. Take remediation actions in case of damage or improper state is reported or identified. Ensure that access management rules are respected in the technical and datacentre areas. Verify and apply software
and firmware updates. Maintain detailed records of assets in the centralized inventory. - Provide Service Support: Continuous monitoring of the services for issues and resolving any defects or downtime, in line with the organizational level agreements. Monitor the internal support platform and provide professional resolutions to all service requests raised by stakeholders, respecting the service level agreements established. Prepare and support the lab environments and their backend services for organized
events and exercises. - Collaborate and Communicate Effectively: Work closely with service delivery managers, developers, platform engineers, technical leads, and project managers to clarify issues, prioritize efforts, and provide timely and transparent progress updates.
- Support Release and Post-Release Validation: Participate in smoke, sanity, and post-deployment testing to verify correct system behaviour after deployment and ensure production stability.
- The contractor's personnel will be part of a team and will provide the service using an Agile and iterative approach using multiple cycles. The cycle has a duration of 5 working days. The content and scope of each cycle will be agreed with the service delivery manager during the cycle-planning meeting, in writing.
- The contractor's personnel will be part of a team and will provide the service using an Agile and iterative approach using multiple cycles. The cycle has a duration of 5 working days. The content and scope of each cycle will be agreed with the service delivery manager during the cycle-planning meeting, in writing.
- The contractor's personnel will be required to respond, document, categorize and solve all the assigned tickets according to the internal processes and procedures.
- The first 4 cycles will be used by the contractor's personnel (Infrastructure and Platform Engineer) to:
- Gain a detailed understanding of the business requirements, system workflows, various projects and the overall domain.
- Acquire access to all the required systems, platforms and location areas.
- Learn about the current environments, tools, and automation frameworks.
- Begin initial hands-on activities under the guidance of a subject matter expert from the team, to become familiar with the work environment and its limitations.
- Handling of simple infrastructure and platform operation activities, participating in a maintenance event and providing support to "Low" severity service requests.
Subsequent cycles will focus on:
- Handling service requests of any level of severity.
- Participating as an activity owner in all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance activities.
- Developing, evaluating and troubleshooting infrastructure as code and configuration management.
- Collaborating closely with subject matter experts and service delivery managers to clarify, implement and integrate requirements, propose solutions, fix defects and provide root cause analysis.
- Maintaining and improving infrastructure and platforms services.
- Update and create internal documentation.
- Participate in diverse activities like technical events and exercises, by providing direct support to lab environments and services.
- Provide added value for the evolution of the infrastructure and platforms as a service.
- Resolved service requests according to the service level agreement between ASB and the stakeholder.
- Infrastructure and platform elements and services maintained and available.
- Existent and new infrastructure as code and artifacts states are in line with the required need.
- Maintenance events finalized as planned.
- Support provided to events and exercises is according to the planned requirements.
- Improvements of infrastructure and platform elements are satisfying the required capabilities.
- All delivered artifacts, code and configurations are documented on the internal wiki page or in the centralized documentation repository.
The Contractor's personnel is expected to understand and support the current Platform Engineering landscape, including:
- IaaS and PaaS provision: Understanding the organizational level agreements established and the stakeholder requirements.
- Platform's scope: Ability to identify and comprehend the different platforms and their purpose, in order to correctly support and participate in activities that align to each platform scope; information about platform segregation and the security implications are detrimental for daily task execution.
- Core Services: Familiarity with the location and structure of the core services solutions (orchestration tool, versioning, artifact management, DNS etc.) in order to maintain, troubleshoot and improve the stakeholder facing services; awareness of the conditions and limitations of the implemented core services facilitate a clear understanding of the existing gaps and improvement directions.
- Security aspects: Understand the different security classifications for every platform and its corresponding infrastructure.
The Contractor's personnel will report progress to the Head of Assurance Solutions Branch, Service Delivery Managers, or Project Manager on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
Progress reports will include:
- Completed activities and milestones, including maintenance tasks, service requests resolved, JIRA issues done and service improving actions finalized.
- Pending tasks, dependencies, and items requiring input, clarification, or review from third parties, product owners, or other stakeholders.
- Issues, challenges, or risks affecting the service delivery, coverage, or overall infrastructure or platform quality.
- Feedback received from stakeholders and suggested improvements, and how it has been addressed or incorporated.
Practical Arrangements:
This is a deliverables-based contract.
The service depicted in this SOW is expected to be carried by a single contractor's personnel.
Place of Performance:
The contractor shall provide services 100% On-site NCIA The Hague, NLD. Exceptional teleworking activities to support service delivery can also be arranged with the line manager's coordination and approval.
Hours of Operation Service:
The service will be conducted during normal office hours (Monday to Thursday from 08h30 until 17h30 and Friday from 08h30 until 15h30) following the NCIA The Hague, NLD calendar, as well as outside office hours and on weekends, if necessary. Exceptional For these occasions cycle price remains unchanged as the effort should
be included in the cycle scope.
NCIA Furnished Property and Services:
The contractor's personnel will be provided with NCI Agency issued laptops and user accounts for accessing NATO NR network and the NATO Software Factory (Azure DevOps). This equipment is the property of NCI Agency and must be returned upon termination of the contract. If the equipment is required to be shipped to a location, it
will be at the expense of the expeditor. Personal laptops and equipment are not permitted inside NCI Agency. You will be required to use the assigned laptop while in the premises.
Travel:
There may be requirements to travel to other sites within NATO for completing the service.
Travel will be the responsibility of the contractor and the expenses will be reimbursed in accordance with Article 5.5 of AAS Framework Contract and within the limits of the NCIA Travel Directive. They will be invoiced separately to the purchaser by the service provider, in accordance with the terms and conditions of the framework agreement.
These additional travel costs are considered an extra charge to the overall bid price.
Other:
Short periods of absence are acceptable as long as deliverables within the established targets are completed. Planned and unplanned absences must be communicated to the service delivery managers.
Qualification:
The consultancy support for this work requires following qualifications:
Technical Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience as a DevOps Engineer, with an emphasis on IaaS and PaaS, with at least 1 year of hands-on experience in datacentre maintenance.
- CI|CD practical knowledge with an emphasis on Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, version control and artifact management tools;
- Kubernetes (Rancher) hands on experience regarding Kubernetes cluster provisioning, administration and troubleshooting;
- Practical experience with core services administration and maintenance like LDAP/Active Directory, DNS, NTP, antivirus enterprise solutions, WSUS, MECM.
- Unix and Microsoft Windows OS administration skills
- Proven datacentre operations knowledge and experience.
- Customer support soft skills and experience
- Practical knowledge in the administration of VMware stack
- Experience in working with one of the public cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud
- Networking knowledge: software defined networking and standard networking
- Curious and analytical thinker with the ability to identify defects, assess risks, and recommend improvements; ask the right questions early
- Strong communicator who bridges the gap between technical and non-technical roles
- Detail-oriented, but also focused on what matters most for the user and business
- Adaptable, with a continuous improvement mindset and willingness to grow into automation
- Excellent command of English (written and verbal) for clear reporting and documentation of test results. English: C1 (mandatory)
- Able to work independently and proactively manage testing schedules and priorities.
- Collaborative team player, willing to share knowledge, support peers, and contribute to process improvements.