2024-0155 Data Lake Delivery Engineer

Deadline Date: Friday 6 September 2024

Requirement: NATO Contractor Support – Interoperability Standardization (Data Lake Delivery Engineer)

Location: The Hague, NL

Full Time On-Site: No

Time On-Site: 50%

Period of Performance: BASE period: 07 October 2024 (tentative) – 31st December 2024

Start date is as soon as possible but not later than 07 th of October 2024

2025 Option: 1st January 2025 until 26st December 2025

2026 Option: 1st January 2026 until 31st December 2026

2027 Option: 1st January 2027 until 31st December 2027

2028 Option: 1st January 2028 until 31st December 2028

Required Security Clearance: NATO SECRET

1. INTRODUCTION

The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency) located in The Hague, The Netherlands, is currently involved in the development of new capabilities for NATO as well as in the support of existing capabilities. In the light of these activities, the C2 Service Centre is looking for solution architect with experience in C2 System Engineering, Data Lake, Data Modelling and Cloud Activities.

Service Delivery Engineer will provide the technical C2 expert subject matter expertise solutions and communication of high-level structures to enable and guide the design and development of integrated solutions that meet current and future business needs.

Changes to service, process, organisation, operating model and other aspects may be required in addition to technology components, and solutions must demonstrate how agreed requirements (such as automation of business processes) are met, any requirements which are not fully met or, and any options or considerations which require a business decision.

2. OBJECTIVES

The main objective of this statement of work is the support the development of new and maintenance of existing software modules, provide the service delivery and solution engineering solutions to NATO Data Lake ecosystem of capabilities of Lake Diver (search) and Integration Core (Data Lake Node).

3. SCOPE OF WORK

The scope is supporting Research and Development (R&D) of the future NATO capabilities developed by NCIA for NATO enterprise and take on the testing effort in various venues across NATO.

The services will be delivered in Sprints, and each sprint will have the duration of two weeks. During one sprint, the assigned personnel will act as one of the key operational and technical while developing and demonstrating future Data Lake ecosystem consisting of Data Lake, INT-CORE Data Lake Node and Lake Diver, performing the following activities:

• Act in the position of the senior user expert to guide the development team to make sure that capabilities are being developed useful to NATO Enterprise.

• Act as a deputy Product Owner and, deputy, managing stakeholders to capture and develop the requirements, architecture, components and vision of Data Lake, Lake Diver and INT-CORE.

• Engage with user communities to capture the operational requirements.

• Participate in yearly exercises such as Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise (CWIX) as one of the technical leads in the month of June taking place in Poland. Engage with nations to develop test plan scenario, architecture and support the execution of the exercise as the key SME.

• Visit operational entities across NATO Enterprise to conduct interviews with operators. Understand user requirements and translate the requirements into solutions.

• Produce detailed component specifications and transform it into detailed designs for implementation.

• The provision of comprehensive guidance on the development of, and modifications to, solution components to ensure that they take account of relevant architectures, strategies, policies, standards and practices and that existing and planned solution components remain compatible. If needed, act as part the development team by developing software code. Ensure appropriate standards (including industrial, international and NATO) are adhered. Provides advice on technical aspects of system development and integration (including supporting change management processes).

• Assist in the preparation of technical plans and works to ensure that appropriate technical resources are made available.

The content and scope of each sprint will be agreed during the sprint-planning meeting, in writing, based on the activities mentioned above.

All of the defined deliverables are deliverable artefacts such briefings, reports, designs or specifications with a well-defined NCI Agency-specified format.

All deliverables are to be peer reviewed within the deliverable cycle. Input and guidance will be provided by NCI Agency in written from or/and during the targeted review meetings.

LAKE DIVER INT-CORE (DATA LAKE NODE) AND DATA LAKE

NATO Lake Diver is a natural language search prototype capability, currently classified as Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This capability is leveraging NATO Data Lake and NATO Integration Core (INT-CORE). Lake Diver is based on JavaScript front end.

INT-CORE is an enabling Functional Area System (FAS) developed in C# with its web component undergoing transition from Silverlight to HTML5. INT-CORE is supporting NATO and national Functional Area Systems by providing data-centricity, data management, data augmentation and data integration. INT-CORE is designed to provide a toolbox for Data Mangers across the NATO enterprise to configure data services in ad-hoc fashion.

INT-CORE provides flexible and adaptable mechanisms that enable information exchange to support the C5ISR, mission-specific business processes and bridge information exchange gaps while bringing:

• Rapid provision of information exchange bridging services;

• Supporting transformation of information exchanges from system centric to data centric;

• Aggregation of Battle Space Objects using different formats and protocols for all data sources;

• Flexible translation, fusion and augmentation of the data for consumers in a required format and protocol;

• Enhanced interoperability within NATO and nations between FAS;

• Improved situational awareness throughout the battle space;

• Integration with new data sources can be done without the software code changes, allowing the rapid delivery of validated solutions to emerging requirements;

• Provision of system administration, monitoring, error handling and error notification capabilities;

INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDIZATION

Within the context of the Interoperability Standardization Program of Work, as well as other related projects such as the development of NATO Core Data Framework (NCDF), the selected personnel will undergo different development and engineering tasks related to interoperability of multinational systems.

4. PAYMENT MILESTONES AND DELIVERABLES

The payment shall be dependent upon successful acceptance of the Delivery Acceptance Sheet (DAS) – (Annex A) including the EBA Receipt number Payment will be provided based on these deliveries as indicated in the table Invoices shall be accompanied with a Delivery Acceptance Sheet (Annex A) signed by the Contractor and project authority.

The NCIA team reserves the possibility to exercise a number of options, based on the same sprint deliverable timeframe and cost, at a later time, depending on the project priorities and requirements.

Schedule of payments is based on the acceptance of the deliverables as described in table below:

Deliverable 01: 2024 Base: 6 Sprints of Software Engineering

Payment Milestones: Upon completion of each second sprint and at the end of the work.

Deliverable 02: 2024 Option: 4 Sprints of SoftwareEngineering (Optional)

Payment Milestones: Upon completion of each second sprint and at the end of the work.

2025 OPTION: 01 January 2025 to 31 December 2025

Deliverable 01: Up to 24 sprints

Payment Milestones: Upon completion of each second sprint and at the end of the work.

2026 OPTION: 01 January 2026 to 31 December 2026

Deliverable 01: Up to 24 sprints

Payment Milestones: Upon completion of each second sprint and at the end of the work.

2027 OPTION: 01 January 2027 to 31 December 2027

Deliverable 01: Up to 24 sprints

Payment Milestones: Upon completion of each second sprint and at the end of the work.

5. SCHEDULE

The BASE period of performance is as soon as possible but not later than 07th of October 2024 and will end no later than 31st December 2024.

One Sprint length equals to two weeks.

The contractor will propose a kick off meeting within one week after signing of the contract.

6. CONSTRAINTS

All the deliverables provided under this statement of work will be based on NCI Agency templates or agreed with the project point of contact.

All architecture artefacts, scripts, documentation and required code will be stored under configuration management in the provided TIDE, TIDE GIT and/or NCIA AZURE as part of the NSF Cloud.

Part of the work may involve handling classified networks, therefore, a security clearance NATO Secret is expected for the contractor undertaking this project.

Contractor must deliver travel estimates 2 weeks from the point of the request in order to update Purchase Order authorizing contractors travel.

7. SECURITY

The services performed under this SOW require that the assigned personnel have a valid NATO SECRET security clearance.

The expected classification level of the deliverables is NATO UNCLASSIFIED.

8. PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS

This is a deliverables-based contract.

The contractor shall support the NCIA on-site for up-to 50% of time in the NCIA The Hague premises of contract performance. Contractor can provide services remotely for up-to 50% of the remaining time in a NATO country as per NATO Security Policy.

Contractor is foreseen to travel to NATO Sites. Contractor must obtain USA and EU business visas. The costs of visa issuing shall be the responsibility of the contractor. Purchaser is not responsible for paying any costs for visa issuing process, including the man-effort.

It is foreseen that the contractor will support NCIA during various exercises and conferences across the year. It is expected that the contractor will travel for up-to 12 weeks within NATO countries in addition.

Travel costs are out of scope and will be borne by the NCI Agency separately in accordance to the provisions of the AAS+ Framework Contract.

The work depicted in this SOW is expected to be carried by a single contractor.

9. QUALIFICATIONS

[See Requirements]

Requirements

7. SECURITY

The services performed under this SOW require that the assigned personnel have a valid NATO SECRET security clearance.

9. QUALIFICATIONS

THE FOLLOWING EXPERTISE AND KNOWLEDGE IS ESSENTIAL FOR THIS REQUIREMENT

For the tasks under this task order, we require the contractor to have the following qualifications:

Expert Military C2 system operations user with broad knowledge of many different types of C2 systems and product offerings. Ideally signals engineer with military background Strong knowledge of C2 systems integration in the ecosystem of military domain Strong knowledge of at least 4 years of experience with data translations, transformations and modelling processes OR 4 years of related experience in military message use, modelling and/or fusing such as TDL, CoT, NVG and LINK16 . The contractor has strong knowledge and practical experience of the following (a minimum of 24 months in the last 40 months) with: Systems Integration using modern solutions such as Modern C2 systems or industry equivalent of Data Bricks, Apache Kafka, Sparks, RabbitMQ and/or similar; Software or System Architecting in modern industry standards such as UML; Ideally knowledgeable in TOGAF or DODAG Knowledge of modern software development methodologies ( Software development life cycles, Agile methodologies), a certification in the field of agile software development and/or SCRUM is a plus. It is desirable that the contractor is well experienced with JSON, XML, XSD, will have to learn XQUERY and XPATH and/or XSLT rapidly, Very Desirable, but not mandatory knowledge in XSLT The contractor is familiar with including DNS, domains, PKI certificates, network designs; Capable of leading team of contractors when needed. Comfortable in presenting solutions to working groups The contractor has a flexible, cooperative and customer focussed attitude; sets high standards for quality and quantity; monitors and maintains quality and productivity; works in a systematic, methodical and orderly way; The contractors must have the nationality of one of the NATO nations. Language Proficiency: Fluency in English, both written and spoken, is required. NOTE: Most of the work of the NCI Agency is conducted in the English language.

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