Solution Architect - Senior Software Engineer Consultant - Req. #581737

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child, HOPE!

Consultancy Title: Solution Architect - Senior Software Engineer Consultant  Section/Division/Duty Station: Social Policy Team - Programme Division, NYHQ Duration: July 4, 2025, to March 30, 2026 Home/ Office Based: REMOTE    About UNICEF If you are a committed, creative professional and are passionate about making a lasting difference for children, the world's leading children's rights organization would like to hear from you. For over 70 years, UNICEF has been working on the ground in 190 countries and territories to promote children's survival, protection and development. The world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff in more than 145 countries.   BACKGROUND Purpose of Activity/ Assignment: To achieve better results for children, in a more efficient and effective way, UNICEF has initiated the mainstreaming and scale up of the humanitarian cash transfer (HCT) modality across the organization. This has become a priority area of work under UNICEF’s strategic plan, as well as UNICEF’s agenda to increase the resilience of households, communities, and systems.     As part of its HCT scale-up plan, UNICEF has developed an integrated software called HOPE - Humanitarian cash Operations and Programme Ecosystem. HOPE is UNICEF’s humanitarian cash transfer management information system. HOPE can (i) collect beneficiary data, (ii) associate data with cash programmes, (iii) create target population (iv) manage payment lists (v) send them to Financial Service Providers (FSP), (vi) reconcile payments, (vii) triangulate payment verification information directly from beneficiaries, (viii) handle grievances and feedback, as well as (iv) reporting.     HOPE enhances the quality of programmes implementing Humanitarian Cash Transfers (HCT) by increasing compliance with UNICEF guidance and tools and ensuring accountability and traceability of the information managed.   UNICEF is looking for a competent Senior Software Engineer consultant to develop additional functional and technical features to be implemented to enhance the beneficiary data management experience for UNICEF Country Offices.    Technology  HOPE utilizes Python as a programming language and Django as a framework for its admin interface. React is used for front end development. As HOPE continues to scale as a system and scope, UNICEF will be seeking engagement with technology partners to develop new features for the roadmap above.  In this engagement, the consultant shall be participating in relevant vendors meetings required for the completion of his/her tasks.   Accountabilities: Under the direct supervision of the PG SPSP HCT team data manager, and in close collaboration with the   ICTD Core Solution Unit IT Manager, the consultant will be responsible for the following deliverables: 1. Complete the front end and backend HOPE refactoring coupling within one Docker, Move from Graph QL to Django Rest Framework, ensure Code Coverage ~95% 2. Implement technical measures to pull out grievances’ modules from HOPE stack in order to benefit from independent maintenance across modules. 3. Support the development of a biometrics solution for registration/deduplication and beneficiary authentication, utilizing Voice and Face Photo information.  4. Support the Development of the Country workspace, a system enabling the manipulation of registration data before uploading into HOPE.  5. Refactor deduplication by removing data husband elastic search and enable programme specific deduplication rules 6. Complete Country Report features to allow users to have granular access to HOPE data 7. Achieve HOPE distributed architecture by defining and implementing a technical solution to have different databases (e.g.: per group of time zones) to optimize maintenance time slot and performance Under the above-mentioned high-level activities framework, the modality of implementation of the above mentioned deliverables will be jointly determined with HOPE team beneficiary data manager and IT manager in an agile way and are outlined in summary with the activities below. The consultant will directly interface with the HOPE team beneficiary data manager in Programme Group Social Policy Social Protection in concert with the HOPE IT Manager. Upon successf