Job offer

Are you passionate about computational methods and multimodal media data? Are you motivated in supporting and collaborating with a growing interdisciplinary network of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) researchers, and helping them use news, social media and other type of media data to answer crucial research questions about the digital society? Are you interested in building, supporting and advancing the Dutch national research infrastructure for SSH research? Then this research engineer position is right for you.

Join Us! Integrating online news, including websites, social media, and digital newspapers in a way that allows researchers across the SSH field answer crucial research questions about the digital challenge is a major challenge. While significant contributions have been made, researchers struggle with logistical (e.g. massive datasets), methodological (e.g. complex computational techniques), administrative (e.g. platform companies increasingly reluctant to share data), as well as legal and ethical concerns on how to do this research. As part of the Macroscope Research Project, you will play a central role in integrating existing initiatives and enabling the creation of a truly National Media Corpus, designed with sustainability in mind, supporting long-term adaptability while ensuring privacy, data security, and respect for intellectual property rights.

What are you going to do You will:

• Design and implement the Netherlands Media Corpus (NMC) in close collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders within the SSH field
• Integrate, support and expand existing data collection tools within the SSH national infrastructure, including the interoperability standards between these tools and the NMC
• Work with SSH researchers to develop new methods, processes and infrastructure solutions for the capture and processing of diverse content formats
• Coordinate the cascade grants program for development of new tools within the SSH field, and support researchers/research groups with these developments
• Ensure compatibility of the NMC within a broader ecosystem, in particular the indexing of individual content units from the NMC within an integrated Knowledge Graph, You will have the opportunity to attend training courses and both national and international events and become part of the ODISSEI network.

You will work here This position is embedded within the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and at the FMG Research Lab at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam. ASCoR is the research institute for Communication Science, structured around four program groups: Persuasive Communication, Communication, Organizations and Society, Political Communication & Journalism, and Youth & Media Entertainment. For more information, see the ASCoR website. The FMG Research Lab supports all researchers in the Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences with research engineers and other support staff.

This position is supervised by prof. dr. Theo Araujo and by prof. Dr. Jessica Piotrowski, as part of the broader research project Macroscope. The Macroscope is a collaborative initiative by two major Dutch research infrastructures: ODISSEI, focused on social science and economic data, and CLARIAH, which houses cultural and linguistic archives. The Macroscope will allow researchers to securely link and analyse massive datasets spanning social, cultural, and digital domains across the entire Dutch population. The project unites 14 Dutch universities with leading institutes, including Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Centerdata, SURF, the Netherlands eScience Center, the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, DANS, the National Library (KB), the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (B&G), and the KNAW Humanities Cluster".

• You are independent, responsible and motivated, with the ability to work flexibly as part of a team.
• You hold a university degree in computer science, data engineering, information systems, computational social science or a closely related technical field; a PhD is an asset but not required.
• You have at least 2 years of experience in technical roles within research infrastructures, data-intensive organizations, HPC environments or large-scale digital platforms. This includes demonstrated experience managing complex, multi-institutional technical programs. Experience with secure data access, linked data, or trusted research environments is a plus.
• You have experience in developing interoperable systems, APIs, metadata workflows, or integration layers across heterogeneous platforms. Ideally you would have familiarity with deploying or supporting AI and machine-learning workflows, including large models, large network analytics, and multimodal data processing
• You have experience with collecting, parsing, analyzing, integrating and categorizing multimodal media data. Ideally you have familiarity with FAIR data principles, and how they apply to media and web data.
• You have advanced programming skills for the following activities (or, in case of knowledge gaps, a clear willingness to develop yourself in these areas):

• Web development, such as familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and/or TypeScript; Experience with frameworks such as React or Vue.js is desirable. Knowledge of a popular web framework is a plus.
• DevOps skills, including deploying applications, using automation tools, and working with command-line tools, and experience with Git
• Data extraction, collection, wrangling, linkage and analysis in Python, with a willingness to learn a new language if the project demands it.

• Experience coordinating and/or interfacing with interdisciplinary teams, including technical teams, legal, ethics and privacy experts, external partners, developers and researchers in an academic or research context.
• You are well organized, adaptable and willing to apply yourself to a wide range of new skills.
• You have knowledge of and experience in the academic field and/or research infrastructures in the social sciences.
• You are well organized and have attention to detail. You can communicate well and have professional oral and written command of English (C1-level CEFR or equivalent).
• Dutch proficiency is not required but is a plus.