SYSTEM ARCHITECT

Médecins Sans Frontières, founded in 1971, is an international medical humanitarian organization that provides emergency medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care. Our teams are made up of tens of thousands of medical professionals, logistics, administrative and various other professions, all guided by our medical ethics and our principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality.

MSF WaCA, created in 2019, is the first MSF headquarters in Africa, and responds to the desire to reinvent the MSF movement after 50 years of humanitarian actions in the world, for more access to care, more reactivity and proactivity for greater medical coverage of affected populations in the world.

Why join us?

You are preparing to become a member of the MSF family, with over 50 years of emergency medical action that earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

We are an inclusive organization that considers social and professional well-being a right for all and provides an environment that considers the diversity of each member.

MSF WaCA claims an African anchorage that considers the local expertise with which it contributes to the implementation of its activities and makes each member, a key actor of the new dynamics of the humanitarian action in the world.

Diversity, Inclusion & Safe Recruitment

MSF offers equal recruitment and development opportunities without any form of discrimination based on gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, geographical origin, physical disability or any other discriminatory ground.

 Female candidates who meet the requirements are strongly encouraged to apply.

Persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply, and reasonable accommodations are available upon request.

MSF is committed to applying Safe Recruitment principles, ensuring transparent, fair, and respectful recruitment processes that protect candidates, the organization, and its beneficiaries.

We Are Looking for: SYSTEM ARCHITECT

Department: Information Systems

Direct Manager: Systems Manager

Functional Manager: Systems Manager

Working %: 100%

Position Based in: Abidjan, HQ

Mobility: All MSF – WaCA’s Intervention Zones

Type of Contract: Fixed-Term Contract under Ivorian law; Renewable

Position to be filled: As Soon As Possible

Missions

The Information Systems Architect plays a key role in how technology supports the organization's goals. This position is not just about designing systems: it's about understanding business needs, translating them into intelligent technical solutions, and guiding teams in designing and implementing those solutions effectively.

Objectives

By working closely with technical and non-technical stakeholders, the architect ensures that systems are well-structured, secure, scalable, and aligned with the long-term strategy. It contributes to the adoption of modern development practices, risk management, and technology watch.

Ultimately, this role is about creating a solid foundation for digital initiatives and ensuring that every system developed is reliable, performant, and future-proof.

Main responsibilities

1.        Design and Development

• Work with country missions, finance, supply, medical and HQ teams to gather requirements and turn them into technical specifications.

• Document system architecture, including integration flows, infrastructure diagrams, specifications and SOPs (for example the finance scan-to-archive pipeline and its HQ infrastructure specification).

• Define technology choices, workflows and coding standards across the portfolio, covering ERP, low-code, API and cloud components.

• Design and govern system integrations, such as the UniField–NetSuite RESTlet/SuiteScript architecture and OAuth 2.0 REST APIs, including vendor escalation when third-party APIs misbehave.

• Lead identification and mitigation of technical risks in design and implementation, such as single points of failure, data-sync conflicts, authentication and certificate lifecycles, and cross-country data flows.

• Advise on solution development across the SDLC, from requirements and design through build, UAT, go-live and support.

• Build and release components following DevOps principles, including environment provisioning, nginx reverse proxy and SSL configuration, and staging-to-production promotion.

• Select QA tools and deployment strategy, including staging environments, test data and release checklists.

• Take part in code and configuration reviews and propose technical and methodological improvements (for example approval-path logic and backend table design workflows).

• Evaluate emerging technologies, including FHIR-based interoperability in medical applications and AI-assisted tools for staff, and bring them into architecture practice where they fit.

2.        DevOps

• Implement and maintain CI/CD and release automation for the platforms in the portfolio, with repeatable deployments and rollback paths. e.g. GitHub Actions, shell/Ansible.

• Ensure scalability, security and performance of hosted infrastructure (for example UniField on AWS) using Infrastructure as Code practices, with hardened servers, TLS everywhere, and managed secrets and access.

• Set up and manage transactional email infrastructure (SMTP, DNS verification with SPF/DKIM/DMARC) and hand it over cleanly to development teams.

• Evaluate and recommend DevOps tools tailored to a distributed humanitarian context with limited bandwidth, mixed connectivity and constrained budgets, such as file synchronization and low-code platforms.

• Continuously monitor system performance, availability and backups, and tune capacity and configuration accordingly.

• Run training and workshops for internal IT teams, focal points and country-level administrators on DevOps practices, platform administration and operational procedures.

• Maintain a technology watch and integrate relevant innovations into internal processes.

3.        Project Management and Governance

• Track the progress of releases and deployments across platforms and countries, coordinating with project teams and country offices.

• Maintain a risk register to anticipate and prevent incidents affecting projects, with owners, mitigations and review cadence.

• Monitor and report on KPIs for delivery timeliness, quality and system performance, such as uptime, incident resolution time and release success rate.

• Support budget preparation for IT activities and digital projects, including cloud costs, licences and vendor contracts.

• Support vendors and external partners: scope, SLAs, escalation and technical oversight of deliverables.

• Impalement architecture governance and documentation standards so that systems remain supportable, auditable and transferable

Education

Essential

A bachelor's degree in either; Computer Science, Information Systems, IT, Software Engineering, or Computer Engineering.

Competencies

Architecture and design: System design, architecture and integration diagrams, SDLC expertise, technical specifications, coding standards, API-driven and integration architecture (REST, OAuth 2.0, RESTlet/SuiteScript, FHIR), and service-oriented patterns across ERP, health-data and low-code platforms.

Development practices: Component development, configuration and code reviews, Git version control, scripting and automation, and CI/CD integration for ERP, API and low-code solutions.

DevOps and IaC: CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), and monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana) for server and application health, backups and availability.

Cloud and infrastructure: cloud management, scalability and performance tuning, nginx reverse proxy and SSL/TLS, DNS and email infrastructure (SES, SPF/DKIM/DMARC), and infrastructure security (hardening, access control, secrets management).

Quality and release management: QA tools (SonarQube, Selenium, JMeter), automated and UAT testing, release management, and deployment strategies (Blue-Green, Canary) with staging-to-production promotion and rollback.

Project delivery: Release planning, milestone tracking, risk register ownership, and KPI monitoring (quality, performance, timeliness, availability) across multi-country deployments.

Budget and vendors: Cost estimation for IT projects, cloud and tooling budgets, licence planning, vendor management and escalation.

Documentation: Architecture documentation, feature specifications, SOPs, technical reports and handover packs for development and operations teams.

Problem-solving and optimization: Root-cause analysis, performance tuning and process optimization, often under constrained bandwidth and connectivity.

Decision-making: Tool selection, architecture choices and risk trade-offs weighed against operational needs, cost, security and long-term supportability.

Communication: Clear oral and written communication with technical teams, country offices, management and vendors, plus training and workshops for internal teams.

Professional experience required

Architecture and design: 5+ years designing scalable, secure systems and integrations, writing technical specifications and architecture documentation, and leading architecture reviews and design decisions. Experience with ERP, API-based or distributed platforms is an advantage.

Development: Solid background in backend and frontend development (Java, Python, JavaScript or similar), with demonstrated application of coding standards and experience conducting code and configuration reviews.

DevOps and cloud: Proven experience implementing CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code and GitOps practices, and managing cloud deployments (AWS or Azure), including release automation, environment promotion and rollback strategies.

Project lifecycle and governance: Involvement across the full project lifecycle, from requirements to design, build, testing, release and support, including release planning, milestone and KPI monitoring (quality, performance, timeliness), and risk identification and control.

Training and mentoring: Experience delivering training sessions and workshops, mentoring developers and technical teams, and introducing new practices and tools into an organization.

Languages Skills

• Fluent in English and French, both written and spoken

Computer Skills

• Operating systems: Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS), Windows Server, Shell Scripting

• Project management tools: Jira, Trello, etc.

• Documentation: Confluence, SharePoint, MS Teams

• Office suite: Microsoft 365

• Agile (Scrum/Kanban), DevOps, CI/CD practices

• QA assurance: Performance testing, Code quality

• Version control: Git, GitHub

• CI/CD: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps

• IaC: Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation

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N.B.: This job description provides a framework for the main responsibilities and primary activities of the position. It is not exhaustive. Therefore, the responsibilities and activities of the position may differ from those described in this job description due to organizational and operational needs.

Deadline: 31st October 2026 18:00 GMT
Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.