Responsibilities

• Heads the Applications, AI and Data Science function, with overall responsibility for UNEP data platforms and applications on both the corporate and programmatic sides.
• Plans and directs the work programme on data science, providing both methodical and managerial supervision of all activities; Plans, organizes and manages staff and evaluates their performance.
• Takes the lead in exploration, identification, and acquisition of data sources to determine their suitability for use in decision making and advancing the goals of the organization. Enables broader use of data sources by applying quality methods to structure, clean, format, parse, and standardize for analytical use.
• Ensures close working relationships with key stakeholders to leverage the use of data science methods to support their programmatic areas with solutions that assist them in accomplishing their mandates.
• Coordinates the design and development of data science products to reveal insights and provides an understanding or knowledge of the data that would otherwise not be detected without the application of advanced analytical methods such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analytics, data and text mining, natural language processing, statistics, and use of relevant algorithms and computational approaches.
• Orchestrates the liaison with technology stakeholders to access infrastructure, software and services needed to develop and deploy data science products.
• Liaises with the Business Analysis team to translate user requirements into technical roadmaps and supervise their implementation in collaboration with business owners.
• Coordinates the design and development of customized visualization and presentation products to reveal the findings of analysis for clients, suitable for all forms of production to include briefings, reports, documentation to oversight bodies, interactive interfaces, and publication quality outputs.
• Guides, trains and supervises staff in the function.
• Represents the organization and the Chief Digital Officer at international and regional meetings and inter-agency activities, as well as internal meetings as needed.
• Advises senior management on trends and developments in data science and recommends appropriate courses of action.

Education

• Advanced university degree (Master’s degree or equivalent) in data science, mathematics, statistics, engineering or any related field involving data science is required.
• A first-level university degree in combination with qualifying experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree.
• A degree in data science with a focus on environmental applications is desirable.

Work Experience

• A minimum of ten years of progressively responsible experience in data science, data analytics, applied mathematics, or software engineering, is required. Experience in statistical and computational methods, such as clustering, classification, correlation, dimension reduction, forecasting, machine/deep learning, and Generative AI is required.
• Experience in data Science tools such as Jupyter, Matlab, Knime, SPSS, SAS or similar Statistical Programming Languages such as R, Python, Javascript, tools for large datasets such as Hadoop, Spark is required. Experience managing software development and data science teams to deliver production-grade data platforms and applications is required.
• Experience managing the delivery of environmental applications with an international or multinational setting is desirable.