IT Assistant ECHA - European Chemicals Agency

Helsinki, Finland

The European Chemicals Agency provides the Member States and the EU institutions with the best possible scientific and technical advice on issues relating to the chemicals under REACH Regulation and biocidal products under the Biocidal Product Regulation. ECHA is responsible for managing, and in some cases carrying out, the technical, scientific and administrative aspects of the regulations, and ensuring consistency at Community level in its application. You will find more information on ECHA website at: www.echa.europa.eu.

1. THE JOB

The IT Assistant will work mainly in the Directorate of Information Systems of the Agency in the Business Information Systems Unit. The directorate is envisaging a significant increase in IT workload due to the implementation of IT systems supporting two new legislations: Biocides and PIC. 
The purpose of the Information Systems Directorate is to contribute to the achievement of the goals and operational objectives of the Agency by ensuring that all Directorates have the ICT infrastructure, the information systems and the support services which are appropriate to carry out their function. 

The Business Information Systems Unit ensures the high quality, timely release of the software applications supporting the Agency’s regulatory and scientific needs. These applications are mostly custom built for ECHA. The Unit runs projects to develop these applications, provides support services and operates the application environments. A major transformation affecting the organisation and the processes of the Unit was started in 2011 aimed at establishing a Service Management Framework - largely inspired by ITIL – an outsourced hosting contract covering also application management services and an IT Business Continuity Plan. In this context, the Unit is implementing, within a service driven organisation, an architecture able to support the Agency’s Business Continuity plans and a risk management-driven IT security management system. All of these results will be further consolidated in the coming years. 

As part of the Business Information Systems Unit the IT Operations Team provides services for the IT directorate; such as managed application environments, web servers, application servers, databases, application monitoring and log data intelligence and statistics. As a member of the IT Operations Team, the IT Assistant is responsible for delivering and managing many of these services and will participate in areas related to delivering optimised application hosting solutions for the Agency. 

In particular, she/he will be responsible for the following tasks:

• Delivering, defining and managing IT services within the scope of the IT Operations team, specifically in the area of Java application administration (web servers, application servers, servlet containers) as well as supporting delivery tools (monitoring, diagnostic, automated provisioning, revision control);
• Delivering, defining and managing application services with internal service delivery teams as well as external providers whenever an outsourced hosting provider participates in the delivery of the services;
• Constantly monitoring the performance of the IT services within the scope of the IT Operations team and particularly the performance of incident and problem management to ensure high quality IT service to end users;
• Continuously interacting with the service managers in charge of other services in the Directorate Service Portfolio to ensure smooth end-to-end delivery of the services;
• Engineering and improving solutions to enhance the delivery of the IT services within the scope of the IT Operations team;
• Supporting the coordination and management of external contractors;
• Participation in procurement and contract management.

2. QUALIFICATIONS

a) Successful completion of post-secondary level education attested by a diploma.
Or 
b) Successful completion of secondary education giving access to post-secondary education and at least three (3) years professional experience. 

Only qualifications issued by EU Member State authorities or EEA authorities and qualifications recognized as equivalent by the relevant EU or EEA Member State authorities will be accepted.

3. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

To qualify for this profile, you must have at the closing date for applications a total professional experience of at least six (6) years acquired after achieving the minimum requirements stated out in 2.2 a) and b). At least, four (4) years of your total professional experience must be relevant professional experience in the fields listed in the section 1. 

Professional activity in any of the following areas of work shall be considered relevant professional experience:

System administration experience with common platforms related to custom built Java applications running in various operating systems environments e.g.:

• Web servers: Apache HTTP Server, IIS;
• Application servers and servlet containers: Oracle WebLogic Server, JBoss Application Server, Apache Tomcat;
• Databases: Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL;
• Supporting delivery tools: Nagios, Zenoss, Oracle Enterprise Manager, System Center Operations Manager, Jenkins, Hudson, Chef, Splunk, git, subversion;
• IT service management or delivery experience as part of an organisation’s central IT delivery centre;
• Development experience from medium to large IT projects for custom tailored software systems.

4. SELECTION CRITERIA

If you meet the eligibility criteria, you will be assessed on the basis of the following selection criteria. The candidates who are judged to be the most suitable on the basis of the selection criteria will be invited to an interview.

• Your academic qualifications and their relevance to the main areas of work listed in section 1;

Preference will be given to qualifications obtained in the following fields:

• Computer Science;
• Engineering, Mathematics, Physics; provided you can demonstrate having been specifically trained in Informatics;
• Your professional experience: the range of fields covered; the length, type and level of work done and its relevance to the areas of work listed in section 1 and 3.

The followings will be considered as assets:

• Formal certification in any of the technologies listed in section 3;
• Formal certification in the area of IT service management (e.g. ITIL);
• Experience in procuring, engineering or providing IaaS, PaaS or SaaS solutions.

The academic and professional qualifications and professional experience must be described as precisely as possible in the ECHA CV.

5. HOW TO APPLY

You can submit your application and find more information (complete vacancy notice, application form and ECHA CV) on ECHA website http://echa.europa.eu/web/guest/about-us/jobs/open-positions. 

Important: Failure to submit an ECHA CV will lead to exclusion from the procedure. 

The deadline to fill in the application form and submit the ECHA CV is 19 April 2013 at noon 12:00, Helsinki time (11:00 a.m.CET).