Data Engineer

About the job

Based in The Hague, Netherlands, you will join the Agency as we embark on a journey to transform our IT services to support NATO’s Digital Endeavour. You will join the Chief Technology Office (CTO), which is enabling the digital transformation of NATO ICT – establishing the Agency’s technical vision and IT engineering strategy, and managing the research and development of emerging technology.

What you will do

We are looking for a Data Engineer to deploy, operate and evolve the data infrastructure and tooling that enables NATO to process data efficiently, securely and reliably – across both cloud-connected and airgapped environments. In this role you will:

• Deploy, configure and maintain data platform components (orchestrators, catalogues, object stores, query engines and lakehouse tooling) on containerized infrastructure using GitOps practices, across cloud-connected and airgapped/disconnected environments including the tactical edge.
• Apply DataOps practices to automate, monitor and continuously improve data pipelines – pipeline observability, data quality automation, CI/CD for data and metadata management – and provide basic MLOps support to enable AI/ML workloads.
• Oversee, coordinate, and provide guidance to industry partners to ensure their work aligns with project objectives, timelines and quality standards.
• Advise NATO Enterprise and Alliance partners on data architectural frameworks, including Data Mesh, Data Space and federated governance models, contributing to standardisation and capability coherence across the Alliance.
• Take ownership of platform and architectural challenges, proactively identifying opportunities to improve capability and coherence and driving initiatives with a high degree of autonomy.

This is a hands‑on engineering role with real autonomy: you will be trusted to take ownership of complex challenges and drive them to a result without needing detailed direction.

About you

The valuable knowledge and experience that you bring to this role are:

• A Bachelor’s degree from a nationally recognized/certified university in a related discipline (such as Computer Science or Data Science and Engineering), with at least 2 years of related experience. Exceptionally, the absence of a university degree may be compensated by the demonstration of particular abilities or experience of interest to NCIA – that is, at least 6 years of extensive and progressive expertise in duties related to the function of the post.
• Strong proficiency in Python for building and integrating data engineering components.
• A strong understanding of data engineering concepts – data warehousing, ETL/ELT processes and data governance – and experience planning and maintaining data lakes and pipelines.
• A solid understanding of DataOps principles: pipeline observability and alerting, data quality automation, CI/CD for data assets, lineage tracking and metadata management.
• Hands‑on experience deploying and operating data platform tooling (orchestrators, metadata catalogues, object stores, query engines) in cloud and/or airgapped environments.
• A solid understanding of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Google Cloud or Azure).
• Sound software development practices (version control, CI/CD, unit/functional testing) and a solid understanding of data security best practices.
• A thorough knowledge of English (written and spoken) is essential.

Desirable experience includes: basic MLOps familiarity (ML pipeline packaging, model versioning and registry, experiment reproducibility and model serving); practical experience in airgapped, disconnected or operationally isolated environments; exposure to Data Mesh and federated data architectures; knowledge of data standards and governance frameworks (such as DCAT or ODPS); multi‑classification security approaches such as attribute‑based access control (ABAC) or policy enforcement (OPA); and experience with AI/ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Transformers).

What we offer

• Genuinely meaningful work as part of the most successful alliance in history.
• A five‑year contract with a competitive tax‑free salary and household and children’s allowances.
• Privileges for expatriate staff, including expatriation and education allowances (where eligible), additional home leave and other benefits.
• Excellent private health insurance scheme.
• Generous annual leave, offering 30 days plus official holidays.
• Pension benefits under the NATO Pension Scheme.
• Growth and development programs, including professional training and wellbeing initiatives.

The NCI Agency prides itself on being an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment of mutual respect and value uniqueness and differences in gender, gender identity, race, ethnic or cultural origin, age, religion, sexual orientation and physical or neurocognitive ability.