2025 - 0302 Systems Engineering Services (NS) - TUE 2 Sep - Remote Eligible

Cloud Automation Technology Contractor

NCIA, as the main ICT service provider in NATO, is the main technical entity providing subject matter expertise to support Allied Command Transformation (ACT) Science and Technology (S&T) Programme of Work (PoW) and relevant exercises in 2025. NCIA Chief Technology Office (CTO) Innovating Team is looking for a contractor who will provide day-to-day technical support to in the area of cloud automation technology and exercises in 2025.

NCI Agency is contributing to the ACT's S&T experimentation participate in designing and automating the deployment of multiple NATO C2 applications in a combined public and private cloud environment. The contractor will have the opportunity to implement CI/CD best practices and automation in a multi-cloud context leveraging an open source stack. The candidate is also expected to influence the deployment and automation strategy and implement their ideas with a focus on abstracting the infrastructure and platform services from application developers.

Under the direction/guidance of the NCIA Point of Contact or delegated staff, the contractor will perform the following activities:

• Support NCI Agency in the NATO Programmes of Work with ACT in the area of cloud automation technologies.
• Provide technical support to NATO exercises and associated events organized by NATO bodies and the Agency.
• Collaborate to the development of software automation code using Terraform, Ansible and/or Helm for the events.
• Perform cloud administration tasks on an AWS account based on GitOps, and on multiple Microsoft Azure tenants.
• Collaborate to the planning and organizational aspects for the upcoming experimentations.
• Participate to the bi-weekly project meetings held in the NCI Agency in The Hague either online or face to face.

The contractor will be part of a team and will provide the service using an Agile and iterative approach during multiple sprints. Each sprint is planned for a duration of 1 week. The content and scope of each sprint will be agreed during the sprint-planning meeting.

The following deliverables are expected from the service on this statement of work:

• Deliverable: 15 sprints of cloud automation support, technical support, and test environment development.
• Payment Milestones: Upon completion of each fourth sprint and at the end of the work.

The Purchaser (NCIA) reserves the right to exercise a number of options of one or more sprints based on the same scrum deliverables, at a later time, depending on the project priorities and requirements, at the following cost: for base year (2025) at the same cost, for outer years (2026-2028) the Price Adjustment Formula will be applied in accordance with paragraph 6.5 of the Framework Contract Special Provisions.

Invoices shall be accompanied with a Delivery Acceptance Sheet (Annex B) signed by the Contractor and project authority.

The contractor shall participate in daily status update meetings, sprint planning, sprint retrospectives and other meetings, physically in the office, or in person via electronic means using Conference Call capabilities, according to project manager's instructions.

For each sprint to be considered as complete and payable, the contractor must report the outcome of his/her work during the sprint, first verbally during the retrospective meeting and then in written within three (3) days after the sprint's end date. The format of this report shall be a short email to the NCIA Point of Contact mentioning briefly the work held and the development achievements during the sprint.

This task order will be active immediately after signing of the contract by both parties but not before required starting date of 6 October 2025.

If the 2026 option is exercised, the period of performance is 01st January 2026 to 31st December 2026.

If the 2027 option is exercised, the period of performance is 01st January 2027 to 31st December 2027.

If the 2028 option is exercised, the period of performance is 01st January 2028 to 31st December 2028.

All the deliverables provided under this statement of work will be based on NCI Agency templates or agreed with the project point of contact.

All code, scripts, documentation, etc. will be stored under configuration management and/or in the provided NCI Agency tools.

All the deliverables of this project will be considered NATO UNCLASSIFIED.

Part of the work may involve handling classified networks, therefore, a security clearance at the right level is expected for the contractor(s) undertaking this project, although the contractor may start working already while the clearance process is ongoing.

The security classification of the service will be up to NATO RESTRICTED (or NATO UNCLASSIFIED until the NATO SECRET security clearance has been obtained).

The contractor is required to hold or be able to obtain a valid NATO SECRET security clearance.

Access to the NCI Agency NATO Software Factory platform will be provided in coordination with the NCIA Point of Contact or delegated staff.

The contractor may be required to travel to NCI Agency, Brussels, Belgium and other sites within NATO for completing these tasks. Travel expenses will be reimbursed to the individual directly (outside this contract) in accordance with Article 5.5 of AAS Framework Contract and within the limits of the NCIA Travel Directive.

This service must be accomplished by ONE contractor.