NATO offers you more than a job. It gives you a mission: building peace and security for one billion people in Europe and North America. The NATO Communications & Information Agency is leading NATO’s Digital Endeavour. We are NATO’s technology and cyber leaders, helping NATO Nations to communicate and work together in smarter ways. Our work is challenging and meaningful, and you will develop and apply your expertise as part of a dynamic international team of civilian and military professionals.

What do we offer?

• Genuinely meaningful work as part of the most successful alliance in history;
• 3 year contract with competitive tax-free salary and household and children’s allowances;
• Privileges for expatriate staff including expatriation and education allowances (where appropriate) and additional home leave;
• Excellent private health insurance scheme;
• Generous annual leave of 30 days plus official holidays;
• Pension Scheme.

About the job

Based in Braine L’Alleud, Belgium you will join the Agency as we embark on a journey to transform our IT services to support NATO’s Digital Endeavour.

The NATO Infrastructure Service Centre (NISC) is accountable for planning and executing the full lifecycle management activities (design, transition and operations) for the identified area of responsibility. NISC provides generic, domain independent, technical functionality that enables and facilitates the operation and use of Information Technology resources. NISC services (including: subject matter expertise; acquisition; project management, operations and maintenance; and, disposal) are provided in the following technical domains: network services (to include routing, switching and transmission services), infrastructure hosting, storage and processing, infrastructure networking, HW and SW management, databases and web platform services, as well as identity management.

This role will report to the Service Delivery Manager (SDM) of Infrastructure Backup Service throughout the entire service lifecycle, regardless of where the technology components, processes or professional capabilities reside. You will be responsible for implementing, operating and hardening of various infrastructure data protection and backup technologies, enterprise storage devices, fibre channel switches. You will provide central administration of enterprise storage and backup resources including remote sites. You will also ensure that all required file systems, system data, operating systems and databases are successfully protected and you will identify operational problems and contributing to their resolution.

For a full list of duties, please review the job description here .

About you

We are looking for a talented and knowledgeable Storage and Data Protection Technician with a higher vocational training in a relevant discipline and 3 years of post-related experience.

A different qualification coupled with particularly relevant experience may also be considered.

You should also have:

• Sound practical experience in SAN/NAS network fundamentals (TCP-IP, FC, FCoE, iSCSI, WWN, WWNP, LIFS) with SAN, Unified and NAS storages
• Sound practical experience in one or more of Enterprise data protection products and/or all-in-one or hyperconverged backup appliances such as Veeam, Commvault HyperScale, Netbackup, PowerProtect DP Appliances/Data Manager, Avamar, Networker, Rubric, etc. and their integration with VMware vCenter
• Sound practical experience and understanding of application-aware backups of databases (Microsoft SQL, MySQL, Oracle) and applications (Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange)
• Sound practical experience in administrating backup storages and applying backup policies including data retention, frequency
• Sound practical experience in VMware virtual environments and vSAN
• Certification in one or more of enterprise storage and/or backup products
• ITIL Foundation Certification

Knowledge of English, both written and spoken, is essential.

To learn more about NCI Agency and our work, please visit our website.

The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency) will not accept applications prepared, in whole or in part, by means of generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tools, including and without limitation to chatbots, such as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (Chat GPT), or other language generating tools. All applications prepared, in whole or in part, by means of such generative or creative AI applications may be rejected without further consideration at the sole discretion of the NCI Agency.

Please note that ALL SELECTED CANDIDATES, with the exception of currently employed NATO International Civilians (NIC’s) will be appointed at the first Increment of the indicated NATO Grade, i.e. NATO Grade X, Increment 1.This is the salary referred to in this vacancy notice. Extra increments can only be considered for candidates from another Co-Ordinated Organisation.

Selected candidates who are not nationals of the host country and who have not been continuously resident in the host country for at least one year may be eligible for an expatriate allowance. For the purposes of determining continuous residence, NATO considers mainly the work location at the time recruitment started, independent of whether various ties were kept with the home country. For more information on our allowances click here.

All selected candidates are required to complete a Security Clearance, Medical Clearance and Pre-employment Screening process before joining the NCI Agency. This process will require time, so please keep in mind that you will not be able to start working with us right away.