IT Officer - Data Expert

The Register of Damage for Ukraine, established in May 2023 through an Enlarged Partial Agreement of the Council of Europe, is based in The Hague, Netherlands, with an offfice in Kyiv, Ukraine. It serves as a documentary record of claims and evidence on damage, loss or injury caused by the Russian Federation’s internationally wrongful acts in or against Ukraine. The Register receives claims from individuals, businesses and state and municipal entities in Ukraine regarding damage, loss or injury that they have suffered because of the Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The team within which you will work is the Data Management Unit, which is responsible for providing supporting in the design and roll out of the Register of Damage’s claims management system.

As an IT Officer - Data Expert, your primary mission will be to support and enhance the Reparations Claims Management System (RCMS) through advanced data analysis, fraud detection modeling, and evidence-based insights. You will:

• develop and refine Machine Learning (ML)-based checks for data integrity and risk scoring (e.g. anomaly detection, deduplication, confidence levels);
• implement grouping and sampling methodologies, such as clustering or stratified sampling, to handle large claim sets efficiently;
• design and train advanced NLP/ML models (e.g. large language models, retrieval-augmented generation) to process text data - potentially extracted from Azure Cognitive Services (OCR, translation), if relevant;
• integrate external data sources (satellite imagery, OSINT) into data pipelines using Azure services (e.g., Data Factory, Synapse Analytics), ensuring original structures are preserved;
• produce concise data-driven summaries (dashboards, anomaly reports) for Secretariat and Board decisions;
• ensure data compliance (CoE standards, GDPR-like regulations), maintaining robust documentation and audit logs;
• collaborate and mentor, working closely with ML engineering and IT teams to align on data requirements and best practices.

You must:

• have a completed full course of general secondary education and hold appropriate vocational qualifications; a bachelors degree in statistics, mathematics, data science, or a related field is highly desirable;
• have a minimum of three years of relevant professional experience in data analytics or data science with large-scale datasets;
• have a very good level of English (one of the two official languages of the Council of Europe); knowledge of French, the other official language, would be an advantage;
• be a citizen of the host country or one of the 46 member States of the Council of Europe and fulfil the conditions for appointment to the civil service of that state;
• be present in the Netherlands;
• have discharged any obligation concerning national service (military, civil or comparable);
• not be the parent, child, stepchild or grandchild of a serving staff member of the Council of Europe;
• be under the age of 65 years.

Your application must demonstrate to what extent you have the competencies listed below. To help you doing so, feel free to consult our competency framework.

• Operational - Planning and work organisation
• Operational - Analysis and problem solving
• Operational - Learning and development
• Interpersonal - Service orientation

• Professional and technical expertise:

• statistical programming & ML: proficiency in Python or R, including libraries for anomaly detection, clustering, and NLP (scikit-learn, pandas, etc.);
• Azure Big Data Ecosystem: familiarity with Azure Synapse, HDInsight, Data Lake, and Data Factory for large-scale processing;
• data modeling & queries: experience with Microsoft SQL Server and NoSQL environments for semi-structured data;
• NLP & advanced ML: skilled in building or fine-tuning advanced models (transformers, retrieval-augmented generation) for text analytics;
• cloud integration: ability to integrate external sources (satellite, OSINT) into Azure data pipelines, ensuring data consistency;
• compliance & security: competence in GDPR-like data privacy and CoE standards, with clear documentation and audit trails with good knowledge of fraud detection or risk-scoring frameworks (e.g. anomaly detection, clustering).
• communication & collaboration: skilled at translating complex analytical findings into actionable insights for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Interpersonal - Teamwork and co-operation
• Interpersonal - Relationship building

This job vacancy is for a local external recruitment based on temporary contracts. Employment is limited to 31 December of the current year and may be extended. You can consult the conditions of employment (salaries, allowances, pension scheme, social insurance etc.) on the webpage What we offer.

For more information on how we recruit, you can consult the page Our recruitment process. This recruitment is carried out in accordance with Rule No. 1234 laying down the conditions of recruitment and employment of locally recruited staff members working in Council of Europe Duty Stations located outside of France. The deadline for applications is indicated in the General information section of this vacancy notice (see above) and is fixed at 23:59:59 (CET/CEST). When applying, make sure your motivation shows how your competencies make your profile the best for the role.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Council of Europe welcomes applications from all suitably qualified people, irrespective of sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic or social origin, disability, religion or belief. Under its equal opportunity policy, the Council of Europe is aiming to achieve gender parity in staff employed in each category and grade. At the time of appointment, preference between suitable people shall be given to the person of the gender which is under-represented in the relevant grades within the category to which the vacancy belongs.

Applicants with specific needs are encouraged to request reasonable accommodations at any stage during the recruitment process. Please contact us at [email protected], we will ensure that your request is handled.

The information published on the CoE’s careers website regarding working conditions is correct at the time of publication of the vacancy notice. Any changes to these conditions during the recruitment process will be updated on our Portal and will apply at the time of the job offer. Our career's website is not intended to be exhaustive and may not address all questions you would have. Should you have remaining questions, please contact us at [email protected].