Post-doctoral Researcher / Research Engineer (OPTIMA)

Are you a computational social scientist with a knack for software development? Do you believe that "open science" should be a seamless part of a researcher's workflow rather than a burdensome afterthought?

At the VU FSW Societal Analytics Lab, we are looking for a Post-doctoral Researcher / Research Engineer to join our team to work on the development of OPTIMA: the Observatory for Political Texts, Images, and Multimedia.

Researchers working with digital traces are at a crossroads. While the digital age offers unprecedented access to multimodal data, copyright restrictions and privacy concerns often make that data impossible to share. OPTIMA is a 2-year project funded to solve this. Building on the software prototypes AmCAT and AnnoTinder, OPTIMA creates a collaborative infrastructure for securely storing, sharing, analyzing, and enriching multimodal data—making them "as open as possible, and as closed as necessary."

As a Post-doctoral Researcher or Research Engineer on this project, you will bridge the gap between infrastructure development and social scientific research. In order to build a real-world infrastructure that social scientists will want to use, you need to be an experienced developer that can think like the user. So at the start of this project, you need to either be a social scientist with experience in developing software, or an engineer with a passion for developing social science research infrastructure.

You will work directly with Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, and Sofia Gil-Clavel to transform two existing open-source prototypes (AmCAT and AnnoTinder) into a unified tool to enhance the creation and sharing of multimodal data. You won't just be writing code; you will be designing the standards for how social scientists handle sensitive data and practice FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) science. This involves presenting at international conferences and workshops, and collaborating on academic publications.

The Post-doctoral Researcher / Research Engineer will:

• Lead Technical Implementation: Act as the primary engineer of the OPTIMA roadmap: implementing standardized vocabularies, integrating AmCAT and AnnoTinder, and expanding sharing and non-consumptive research features.
• Architect Open Science Tools: Develop "non-consumptive" research facilities that allow scholars to run analyses on sensitive data without violating privacy or copyright. Implement standardized vocabularies and enable more fine-grained access control.
• Integrate Ecosystems: Seamlessly connect AmCAT (data management) and AnnoTinder (human annotation) using modern web standards and standardized vocabularies (RDF/linked data).
• Foster Co-creation: Work with the project team to run workshops and hackathons, ensuring the infrastructure actually meets the needs of scientists and provides a good user experience.
• Publish & Disseminate: Co-author methodological papers and technical reports on the infrastructure, presenting your work at major conferences like ICA or CompText.

Your profile

• A Ph.D. in the social sciences with a strong computational focus, OR a Ph.D. in a computational field with a demonstrated passion for social science research, OR an experienced research engineer with passion for open computational social science.
• Strong Programming Skills: Proficiency in Python (backend/data science) and/or TypeScript (modern web development). Ideally, you are comfortable moving between both.
• Infrastructure Affinity: Experience with, or eagerness to learn, Docker, API design, and version control (Git/GitHub).
• Methodological Breadth: Interest in Automated Content Analysis, including LLMs, image analysis, and manual annotation workflows.
• Collaborative Mindset: Excellent social skills and the ability to translate "technical speak" into "researcher speak" during co-creation sessions.
• Commitment to Open Science: A firm belief in the importance of transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR data principles.

We realise that each individual brings a unique set of skills, expertise and mindset. Therefore we are happy to invite anyone who recognises themselves in the profile to apply, even if you do not meet all the requirements.

What do we offer?

• Environment: You will be embedded in the Department of Communication Science and the Societal Analytics Lab, a hub of innovation with access to high-performance computing and a vibrant interdisciplinary community.

About us

About the faculty, lab

The Societal Analytics Lab at the VU Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities (FSSH) is a pioneer in bringing computational methods to the study of society. By joining the OPTIMA project, you become part of a team that doesn't just use tools—we build them. Our work is institutionally anchored in MEDem, an emerging European Research Infrastructure, ensuring that the software you build will have a life and impact long after the project ends.

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Are you interested in joining Social Sciences and Humanities? You become part of a dynamic academic community with approximately 900 staff members, over 5,000 regular students and more than 5,000 course participants. In an inspiring and collegial environment, we work together on education and research with impact.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam stands for values-driven education and research. We are open-minded experts with the ability to think freely. By joining forces across the boundaries of disciplines, we work towards a better world for people and planet. Together we create a safe and respectful working and study climate, and an inspiring environment for education and research.