Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. The World Bank Group is an international development institution that uses knowledge, data, research, and technology to address global development challenges. The Application Engineer will maintain and improve a Shiny-based submission portal, provide technical support, manage deployments and data systems, lead QA/UAT testing, and implement feature enhancements for reporting workflows.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
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
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, statistics, or a related field
- Equivalent combinations of education and professional experience will be considered
- 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
- Strong attention to detail and commitment to producing high-quality, traceable deliverables
- Proactive communication with team members and supervisors on progress, risks, and issues
- Ability to work effectively in multicultural teams and environments
- Excellent written and spoken English
- Python/FastAPI, uv dependency management, server-sent events and streaming endpoints
- Azure DevOps repositories, environment-specific configuration (local/QA/prod)
Company Overview