Lead Software Architect, Johannesburg, South Africa 31 views0 applications

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• We offer an attractive compensation package (please refer to the Terms and Conditions section of this vacancy announcement).

Duration: 120 days over 11 months

Reporting to: Lead Advisor, Outbreaks and Epidemics

Background: The African Risk Capacity (ARC) Group, composed of a Specialized Agency of the African Union [1], and a mutual insurance company African Risk Capacity Limited, provides financial tools and infrastructure to support African Union (AU) member states manage natural disaster risks, including outbreaks & epidemics, and improve the way predictable natural disasters are responded to on the continent by reducing the time it takes for assistance to reach those affected through early and local response. ARC achieves this by bringing together three critical elements that create a powerful value proposition for its participants: early warning, contingency planning, and sovereign parametric insurance. Together this package provides governments with access to predictable funding for early and planned responses to support vulnerable populations in the event of disasters. This vehicle allows ARC to help its members build the capacity to lead their responses and reduce their reliance on the international appeals process for assistance over time. More critically, reduced response times save the lives and livelihoods of those affected and protect development gains, essential for growth and building a more disaster-resilient Africa for the future.

Emerging infectious diseases pose an increasing threat to health and economic development in Africa. In the past few years, countries and the international community have moved towards a more robust and well-coordinated response approach towards public health emergencies (PHE). Despite this, and other improvements in preparedness and the increased speed of detection and response, rapid deployment of medical countermeasures and vaccines, timely access to funding in respect to many PHE remains unpredictable. In the circumstances where funding is secured, it is largely on an ad hoc basis and after the occurrence of an event of a given magnitude. Slow and unpredictable funding amplifies both the risk and impact of outbreaks. Any delays in mounting an effective response leads to escalation of outbreak with sustained transmission leading to loss of life, socio-economic disruption of the affected communities, and negative impact on the nation’s development agenda.

ARC, with the support of Ginkgo Biosecurity, developed an infectious disease spread model and a statistical model to quantify the risk posed by epidemic-prone diseases in Africa such as filovirus (Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease) and meningitis respectively, to inform epidemic risk management and risk financing strategies.

The epidemic risk modelling components include:

• A disease spread model, which simulates realistic disease transmission during plausible outbreak scenarios (filovirus modelling);
• The disease spread model, specific to each of the covered pathogens, are used to generate a large pool of plausible epidemic scenarios of various frequencies and severities, known as the event catalogs; and
• The output from the simulation of epidemic scenarios provides a comprehensive database that enables risk analytics such as estimations of human (infections; hospitalizations; deaths) and financial losses.

Based on the epidemic risk modelling and the estimated risk of epidemic occurrence, the ARC Group launched In December 2022 its sovereign parametric risk insurance product for outbreaks and epidemics, with the participation of the government of Senegal. This innovative risk financing instrument, requested in 2015 by African Ministers of Finance in the wake of the West African Ebola Outbreaks in 2013-2016, aims at equipping countries with rapid and predictable funding to contain high-impact infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola, Marburg, and meningitis, and complement the efforts of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) to safeguard the health security across Africa.

ARC, through established partnerships with Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD), the West African Health Organization (WAHO), and Africa CDC, is supporting a capacity-building work to implement disaster risk management and financing practices and build the capacities for surveillance, disease prevention, response and resilience to epidemics and other health emergencies in its member states. These collaborations will also facilitate the prediction and anticipation of future high-impact disease outbreaks through disease intelligence and modelling and allow for the training of public health officers.

Responsibilities and deliverables: This assignment aims to develop a user-friendly, intuitive, and interactive software application and web-based user interface that will enable users to visualize historical outbreak events, run the ARC epidemic risk models for filovirus and meningitis to generate customized views of event catalogs, examine the potential human and financial losses, and guide decision-making through effective visualizations/infographics.

ARC has documentation that shows how the epidemic risk models for filovirus and meningitis work, and how the corresponding event catalogs are generated using simulations produced by the disease spread models. After the completion of event catalog generation, all model output can be analyzed using the provided R-helper functions in the arcdsm package. The arcdsm package is a collection of functions, data, and compiled code, which provide the following functionality:

• Generate event catalogs for selected countries by running disease spread model simulations for covered pathogens.
• Analyze the event catalogs to obtain the estimated frequency and severity of the covered pathogens (filovirus or meningitis) for selected countries.

The Consultant is expected to use the documentation and the server infrastructure provided by ARC to develop the application that users can interact with. The Consultant will work under the supervision of the Lead Advisor, Outbreaks and Epidemics, and work closely with other ARC teams and regional partners to develop a web-based application that should specifically allow users to perform the following tasks: 1. Visualize historical outbreaks and epidemics event for filovirus (Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease) and meningitis in Africa.

2. Visualize countries most at risk for the emergence of filovirus and meningitis events.
3. Display the probabilities of experiencing filovirus outbreaks and meningitis epidemics of various sizes in any given year.
4. Display losses associated with filovirus outbreaks in terms of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths; and visualized average annual losses.
5. Display losses associated with meningitis epidemics in terms of number of districts in alert and number of districts in epidemics; and visualized average annual losses.
6. Calculate and visualize the potential disease burden (e.g., DALYs) and the economic losses.
7. Calculate and visualize the potential benefits of early outbreak intervention and rapid containment: e.g., reduced disease burden (cases and deaths averted); reduced direct cost of outbreak response (health systems cost-savings); reduced indirect cost of illness (households cost-savings); reduced secondary effects on the economy (sustained investments).
8. Estimate the amount of medical countermeasures or other health systems interventions that may be needed under different potential scenarios.

Deliverables: The Lead Software Architect is responsible for taking all business inputs, identifying functional requirements and non-functional requirements (such as availability, resilience, security, etc.), and designing the system that meets all identified requirements. He or she is also responsible for designing a modular and scalable system.

The Lead Software Architect will deliver on the following: 1. Provide an inception report that outlines how the incumbent will carry out the development of a web user interface for outbreaks and epidemics risk analytics in the African region.

2. Develop an operational web-based application for ARC’s filovirus and meningitis epidemic risk models.
3. Report on how the software application was developed (including the software architecture and functional design).
4. Document the source code for the software package developed.
5. Package the software for easy installation, including creating installation scripts and documenting; and installation procedures.
6. Install the software package on a cloud-based server provided by ARC (ARC servers are currently hosted by Amazon Web Services).
7. Develop graphical interfaces for selected epidemic risk analytics as defined in the tasks section above, in collaboration with the UI/UX designer, ARC teams, and partners.
8. Train the ARC teams on the functionality of the software developed.
9. Set up registration and login functionality to ensure that the application is protected from authorized users.

The software application can be developed in any suitable web development framework (e.g., Django/Python, Java Server Faces, etc), preferably a language that is modern, object-oriented and has a large developer community. Given that an interactive web-based interface is required, it would be desired for the interface to be developed using a popular modern frontend JavaScript framework such as React or Vue.js. All the software used for the development of the application must be free and open source.

The Consultant will liaise closely with the ARC team in terms of the ARC disease spread models and event catalogs, the methodologies to be used for running the disease spread model simulations, and the

formatting of the outputs of the model. The outputs visualizations will include tables, charts, infographics, maps, and any other suitable graphical interfaces.

Qualifications and experience required: Education: The prospective candidate must have at a minimum a master’s degree in computer science or similar relevant discipline with a strong expertise in developing web-based applications with user-friendly interactive interfaces.

Experience: Minimum of 8 years of demonstrated experience in software development, particularly developing web-based user interfaces, with proficiency required for programming languages such as Python, PHP, or JavaScript. The prospective Consultant must have relevant experience in developing similar applications, especially GIS-based applications. Professional software development certifications are an added advantage. Knowledge of mathematical modelling of infectious diseases will be a strong asset.

Experience working with African countries and regional African public health institutions.

Knowledge & Skills::

• Strong knowledge of software architecture concepts, design principles and architectural models. ebkKaCs BTn6yA
• In-depth understanding of programming languages, frameworks and technologies related to IT systems.
• Ability to design robust, scalable, and high-performance software architectures in line with business needs and objectives.
• Ability to break down complex problems into simpler components and define the interactions between these components.
• Familiarity with geographical information systems datasets and basic web-based mapping.
• Ability to manage projects and deliver in a fast-paced environment.
• Critical thinking and strong communication and presentation skills.
• Experience working in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary teams.

Languages: Fluency in French is required. Intermediate knowledge of English is highly desirable.

Consultancy duration This vacancy for a Lead Software Architect is a home-based Consultancy for up to 120 days over 11 months.

[1] The ARC design and establishment phase was managed by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), under a MoU with the African Union Commission, and WFP continues to provide administrative services support to the ARC Agency through an administrative services agreement, including procurement services for the purposes of this tender and contract.

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