Application Engineer-Short term consultant -STC

About the role

The World Bank Group is seeking an engineer to maintain and improve a submission portal used by teams across the institution to prepare, draft, and submit structured reports. The platform generates formatted outputs (PDF/DOCX/XLSX) and feeds a downstream reporting pipeline that produces summaries and actionable reports. The system consists of three main components: the submission portal (a large single-file Shiny application with custom authentication, access control, and document import/export functions), the persistence layer, and a storage API.

The consultant will serve as the technical owner of this tooling stack, providing day-to-day technical support, leading QA/UAT testing, and delivering feature improvements. This is a hands-on delivery role requiring direct codebase maintenance, deployment, and issue resolution.

Responsibilities

• Application maintenance and technical support
  • Serve as first- and second-line technical support for portal users, triaging and resolving issues within agreed response times.
  • Diagnose and fix issues in Shiny (e.g., state-management defects, data bleeding, stale inputs).
  • Harden the draft and submission lifecycle, including reliable auto-save and versioned resubmissions.
  • Manage user accounts, roles, and access control following World Bank information-security requirements.
  • Monitor Posit Connect logs, investigate deployment-specific failures, and maintain consistency between local and deployed behavior.
  • Maintain and extend a plumber storage API to ensure serialized, robust pin writes under concurrent multi-user load; test backups and recovery procedures.
  • Convert non-technical feedback (received in Word documents) into a tracked, prioritized backlog and discrete, reviewable commits.
• Quality assurance
  • Design and lead QA and UAT cycles, translating reviewer feedback into actionable tasks.
  • Verify fixes before sign-off.
• Feature improvement
  • Clear open items from feedback rounds, including bug fixes and UI/field changes to align with official templates.
  • Implement new form fields, validation logic, dynamic UI behavior, and export formats as requested by the business team.
  • Improve application maintainability without disrupting production.

Requirements

• Technical Skills
  • Production-level R and Shiny: reactivity (reactiveVal, reactiveValues, observe/observeEvent, req), dynamic UI (renderUI, insertUI), and debugging state-bleeding/stale-input defects.
  • Posit Connect: deployment, manifest/bundle handling, environment variables, API keys, log interpretation, and resolving deployment-specific issues.
  • Pins as a datastore: read-modify-write patterns.
  • SQL databases: relational modeling, transactions, concurrency control, and hands-on experience with PostgreSQL/Databricks (Delta tables, SQL warehouses) via DBI, RPostgres, pool, or psycopg.
  • Plumber APIs: extending, deploying, and debugging single-process storage APIs.
  • Authentication and data hygiene: custom auth layers, role/access control, security best practices (e.g., no secrets in Git, PII handling).
  • Git: feature-branch workflow, disciplined commit messages.
  • R data wrangling and Office/PDF I/O: jsonlite, openxlsx, officer (DOCX import), and report/PDF generation.
  • Quarto and LaTeX: .qmd to PDF with TinyTeX, template editing, and LaTeX build failure diagnosis.
• Desirable Skills
  • Python/FastAPI, uv dependency management, server-sent events, and streaming endpoints.
  • Azure DevOps repositories and environment-specific configuration (local/QA/prod).
• Education

  Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, statistics, or a related field. Equivalent combinations of education and professional experience will be considered.

• Experience
  • At least two years of professional experience in a relevant field.
  • Proven ability to work systematically under demanding timelines with high accuracy and documentation standards.
  • Experience bridging technical and non-technical stakeholders in cross-functional teams.
• Client-Oriented & Project Management Skills
  • Strong attention to detail and commitment to high-quality, traceable deliverables.
  • Proactive communication on progress, risks, and issues.
• Interpersonal Skills
  • Ability to work effectively in multicultural teams and environments.
  • Excellent written and spoken English.
• WBG Culture Attributes
  • Sense of urgency: Anticipate and respond quickly to stakeholder needs.
  • Thoughtful risk-taking: Challenge the status quo to achieve greater impact.
  • Accountability: Empower yourself and others to act and deliver results.

Schedule

Number of working days: 70.