Platform Support Engineer

Spektrum supports apex purchasers (NATO, UN, EU, and National Government and Defence) and their Tier 1 supplier ecosystem with a wide range of specialist services. We provide our clients with professional services, specialised aerospace and defence sales, delivery, and operational subject matter expertise. We are looking for personnel to join our team and support key client projects.

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Who we are supporting 

The NATO Communication and Information Agency (NCIA) is responsible for providing secure and effective communications and information technology (IT) services to NATO's member countries and its partners. The agency was established in 2012 and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

The NCIA provides a wide range of services, including:

• Cyber Security: The NCIA provides advanced cybersecurity solutions to protect NATO's communication networks and information systems against cyber threats.
• Command and Control Systems: The NCIA develops and maintains the systems used by NATO's military commanders to plan and execute operations.
• Satellite Communications: The NCIA provides satellite communications services to enable secure and reliable communications between NATO forces.
• Electronic Warfare: The NCIA provides electronic warfare services to support NATO's mission to detect, deny, and defeat threats to its communication networks.
• Information Management: The NCIA manages NATO's information technology infrastructure, including its databases, applications, and servers.

Overall, the NCIA plays a critical role in ensuring the security and effectiveness of NATO's communication and information technology capabilities.

The program

Assistance and Advisory Service (AAS)

The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency) is NATO’s principal C3 capability deliverer and CIS service provider. It provides, maintains and defends the NATO enterprise-wide information technology infrastructure to enable Allies to consult together under Article IV, and, when required, stand together in the face of attack under Article V.

To provide these critical services, in the modern evolving dynamic environment the NCI Agency needs to build and maintain high performance-engaged workforce. The NCI Agency workforce strategically consists of three major categorise's: NATO International Civilians (NIC)'s, Military (Mil), and Interim Workforce Consultants (IWC)'s. The IWCs are a critical part of the overall NCI Agency workforce and make up approximately 15 percent of the total workforce.

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Role ID – 2025-0350

Role Duties and Responsibilities

• Perform preventive and reactive activities for assuring that all the infrastructure and platform services are available for all the Assurance Solutions Branch’s stakeholders.
• Align all ASB systems and services with the guidance and policies of NCI Agency and NATO.
• Collaborate with other NCI Agency colleagues and sections for ensuring that the platforms and systems are in line with their security accreditation.
• Support security accreditation activities in relation to ASB’s platforms and/or systems.
• Perform regular maintenance, including updates, patches, and bug fixes as needed to prevent disruptions.
• Collaborate with the service delivery managers and their teams to plan and implement periodic maintenance schedules, with reduced impact on the stakeholders.
• Participate in the implementation of new features, services and tools, assess their feasibility and integrate them with the existent elements.
• Develop, maintain and improve infrastructure as code for the deployment and configuration of core systems and services.
• Adopt and support a dry code initiative and strive for less manual intervention.
• Maintain, operate and improve automation, versioning and orchestration tooling.
• Hardware inspections and replacements as part of scheduled or non-scheduled maintenance activities.
• Verification of cabling, patch panels, connectors and cooling equipment.
• Take remediation actions in case of damage or improper state is reported or identified.
• Ensure that access management rules are respected in the technical and datacentre areas.
• Verify and apply software and firmware updates.
• Maintain detailed records of assets in the centralized inventory.
• Continuous monitoring of the services for issues and resolving any defects or downtime, in line with the organizational level agreements.
• Monitor the internal support platform and provide professional resolutions to all service requests raised by stakeholders, respecting the service level agreements established.
• Prepare and support the lab environments and their backend services for organized events and exercises.
• Work closely with service delivery managers, developers, platform engineers, technical leads, and project managers to clarify issues, prioritize efforts, and provide timely and transparent progress updates.
• Participate in smoke, sanity, and post-deployment testing to verify correct system behaviour after deployment and ensure production stability.

Technical Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a DevOps Engineer, with an emphasis on IaaS and PaaS, with at least 1 year of hands-on experience in datacentre maintenance.
• CI|CD practical knowledge with an emphasis on Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, version control and artifact management tools;
• Kubernetes (Rancher) hands on experience regarding Kubernetes cluster provisioning, administration and troubleshooting;
• Practical experience with core services administration and maintenance like LDAP/Active Directory, DNS, NTP, antivirus enterprise solutions, WSUS, MECM.
• Unix and Microsoft Windows OS administration skills
• Proven datacentre operations knowledge and experience.
• Customer support soft skills and experience

Desirable Qualifications

• Practical knowledge in the administration of VMware stack
• Experience in working with one of the public cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud
• Networking knowledge: software defined networking and standard networking

Relevant soft skills

• Curious and analytical thinker with the ability to identify defects, assess risks, and recommend improvements; ask the right questions early
• Strong communicator who bridges the gap between technical and non-technical roles
• Detail-oriented, but also focused on what matters most for the user and business
• Adaptable, with a continuous improvement mindset and willingness to grow into automation
• Excellent command of English (written and verbal) for clear reporting and documentation of test results. English: C1 (mandatory)
• Able to work independently and proactively manage testing schedules and priorities.
• Collaborative team player, willing to share knowledge, support peers, and contribute to process improvements.

Working Location

• The Hague, Netherlands

Working Policy

• On-site

Travel

• Some travel to other NATO sites may be required

Security Clearance

• Valid National or NATO Cosmic Top Secret personal security clearance