Application Engineer-Short term consultant -STC

Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity to help client countries solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries — a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity, and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, the institution invests in groundbreaking projects and uses data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges. For more information, visit

Office of the Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer

The Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer (MDCKO) oversees the World Bank Group's knowledge and partnership agenda and helps ensure that the institution's analytical and operational work responds to the most pressing development challenges facing client countries and global partners. With the launch of the Knowledge Bank in 2026, the World Bank Group is deepening its focus on global knowledge on what works, where, and why. As part of this model, the World Bank Group now operates through five vertical vice presidencies aligned with the mission: People, Prosperity, Planet, Infrastructure, and Digital & AI. In addition, three horizontal departments reporting to the MDCKO enhance knowledge, innovation, and outcome orientation across the World Bank Group. One of those horizontal departments focuses on improving the institution outcome orientation: Department for Outcomes.

Department for Outcomes

The Department for Outcomes provides strategic vision and direction for stronger outcome orientation across the World Bank Group. Its mandate includes advancing thought leadership on development outcomes measurement, proposing revisions and updates to results indicators and methodologies for both project and portfolio-level management, coordinating the development of outcome targets, and strengthening how results are measured and used across the institution. The Department manages the WBG Scorecard — the institution's apex outcomes reporting tool — and supports the development of metrics and systems to evaluate outcomes on cross-cutting themes such as climate, jobs, private sector capital mobilization, women, and youth.

Within this broader mandate, the Department is advancing the AI for Outcomes program within the Outcomes Delivery Unit, which applies artificial intelligence and advanced data science to strengthen outcomes measurement, generate operational insight, and support evidence-based decision making across World Bank Group operations. The program has developed a suite of AI-powered analytical tools and applications now in active use, and ensuring their quality, reliability, and fitness for purpose is a growing institutional priority.

Role Description

For the development and maintenance of a submission portal used by teams across the World Bank Group to prepare, draft, and submit structured reports, we are looking for an engineer to maintain and improve the platform and provide technical support to users. The platform generates formatted outputs (PDF/DOCX/XLSX) and feeds a downstream reporting pipeline that produces summaries and actionable reports. The system has three main components: the submission portal itself, a large single-file Shiny application with a custom authentication and access-control layer, a draft/submission lifecycle and document import/export functions; the persistence layer, which stores data. The consultant will provide day-to-day technical support and maintenance for this system, lead QA/UAT testing, and deliver feature improvements over the current reporting cycle.

The consultant will act as the technical owner of this tooling stack. This is a delivery role rather than an advisory one: the successful candidate will be expected to diagnose and fix production issues directly in the codebase, deploy to Posit Connect, verify behavior on the deployed application against real data, and document what was changed.

The role combines three streams of work. The first is application maintenance and user-facing technical support for the submission portal, including access management, log review, data integrity and incident response. The second is quality assurance: designing and leading QA and UAT cycles, translating non-technical reviewer feedback into a tracked backlog, and verifying fixes before sign-off. The third is to develop small improvements to the tool if needed.

Because the codebase is maintained with AI coding assistants and rule files, the consultant is expected to work fluently in that mode while retaining full engineering judgement over what is committed.

Responsibilities

Application maintenance and technical support

• Serve as first-line and second-line technical support for portal users, triaging reported issues, reproducing them and resolving them within agreed response times.
• Diagnose and fix issues in Shiny (state-management defects, data bleeding, stale inputs, etc.)
• Harden the draft and submission lifecycle, including reliable auto-save and versioned resubmissions.
• Manage user accounts, roles and access control, including password/hash handling and permission changes, following World Bank information-security requirements.
• Monitor Posit Connect logs, investigate deployment-specific failures, and maintain the distinction between local and deployed behavior.
• Maintain and extend a plumber storage API so that pin writes remain serialized and robust under concurrent multi-user load; maintain and test backups and recovery procedures.
• Convert non-technical feedback received in Word documents (the feedback rounds/ process) into a tracked, prioritized todo list and then into discrete, reviewable commits.
• Convert non-technical feedback received in Word documents (the feedback rounds/ process) into a tracked, prioritized todo list and then into discrete, reviewable commits.

Feature improvement

• Clear open items in feedback rounds, comprising bug fixes and UI/field changes required to align the form with official templates.
• Implement new form fields, validation logic, dynamic UI behaviour, and export formats as requested by the business team.
• Improve the maintainability of the application without disrupting the production service.

Selection Criteria

Technical Skills

• R and Shiny at production level — reactivity (reactiveVal, reactiveValues, observe/observeEvent, req), dynamic UI (renderUI, insertUI), shinyjs; ability to debug state-bleeding and stale-input defects in a large application.
• Posit Connect — deployment, manifest and bundle handling, .rscignore, environment variables and API keys on Connect, reading and interpreting Connect logs, and practical experience resolving "works locally but fails deployed" issues.
• pins as a datastore — read-modify-write patterns
• SQL databases — relational data modelling, transactions and concurrency control, and hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and/or Databricks (Delta tables, SQL warehouses) connected from R or Python (DBI, RPostgres, pool, psycopg)
• plumber APIs — extending, deploying and debugging a single-process storage API
• Authentication and data hygiene — custom auth layers, role and access control; a demonstrated security instinct: no secrets in Git, correct handling of a .secrets/ directory, awareness of PII in submissions, no credential logging.
• Git — feature-branch workflow, disciplined commit messages
• R data wrangling and Office/PDF I/O — jsonlite, openxlsx, officer and DOCX import, and report/PDF generation from form data.
• Quarto and LaTeX — .qmd to PDF with TinyTeX/TeX Liv, template editing, and diagnosis of LaTeX build failures.
• Python/FastAPI, uv dependency management, server-sent events and streaming endpoints.
• Azure DevOps repositories, 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 and rigorously, maintaining high standards of accuracy and documentation under demanding timelines.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams, bridging technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Client-Oriented & Project Management Skills

• Strong attention to detail and commitment to producing high-quality, traceable deliverables.
• Proactive communication with team members and supervisors 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 quickly respond to the needs of internal and external stakeholders.
• Thoughtful risk-taking : Challenge the status quo and push boundaries to achieve greater impact.
• Accountability : Empower yourself and others to act and hold each other accountable for results.