Research Applications & Data Services Officer

About the Role

We’re looking for a Research Applications & Data Services Officer to join our New Services Development team. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys exploring emerging technologies, working hands-on with research communities, and translating complex research needs into practical, scalable solutions. You’ll be working at the intersection of research, data, and technology, helping shape next-generation services across the European research and education community. The work is varied, technical, and collaborative, from early-stage exploration and prototyping through to supporting services that can scale across national and European infrastructures. This role suits someone curious, technically minded, and motivated by building services that have real impact across research and scientific communities.

What You’ll Do

Research Data & Technology Exploration

You’ll explore emerging technologies and trends across research data, data science, and AI, identifying opportunities that can support future research services. You’ll contribute to horizon scanning, help assess how technologies apply across the research data lifecycle, and take part in early-stage activities such as proofs of concept, pilots, and technical evaluations.

Service Design & Early Development

You’ll contribute to the design and early development of new services. This includes translating research needs into technical requirements, supporting prototyping activities, and helping assess technical feasibility.

Research Community Engagement

A key part of the role involves engaging with researchers, research communities, and national research and education networks (NRENs). You’ll work to understand complex data-driven workflows and ensure these needs are reflected in the services being designed and developed.

Integration & Infrastructure Collaboration

You’ll support the evaluation and integration of data platforms, analytics tools, repositories, and research computing environments. You’ll also contribute to understanding how services can operate within federated environments, including authentication and authorisation infrastructures (AAI), ensuring they are secure, interoperable, and scalable.

Collaboration & Project Contribution

You’ll work as part of a distributed, international team, contributing technical input to European projects focused on research data and AI-enabled infrastructures. You’ll collaborate closely with internal teams, partners, and external stakeholders to move ideas from concept through to implementation.

About You

You may be a good fit if you…

• Have a technical background in areas such as networking, identity and access management, data management, cloud, or security
• Understand the research data lifecycle and the role of data services in modern research
• Have experience or exposure to research data infrastructures, research computing, or data-intensive environments
• Can translate research or user needs into clear technical requirements
• Enjoy working collaboratively with distributed, international teams
• Are curious, proactive, and motivated to explore new technologies and ideas

Desirable (but not essential)

• Experience working with European or nationally funded research projects
• Familiarity with the research and education networking community (e.g. NRENs or federated infrastructures)
• Understanding of authentication and authorisation infrastructures (AAI)
• Interest or experience in AI-driven research or data services
• Exposure to service design, prototyping, or early-stage service development
• A Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science or Data Science

About Us

GÉANT is at the heart of research and education networking, offering talented people the opportunity to be part of something meaningful and worthwhile. With 150 employees based in Amsterdam and Cambridge, together we deliver an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale. Thanks to our terabit network, 50 million researchers, scientists, academics and students can share record volumes of data unconstrained by location, solving some of humankind’s biggest challenges and supporting critical research into sustainable energy, deep space, high-energy physics, earth observation, environmental disasters, medicine and much more.

Benefits of working for GÉANT

You’ll receive excellent benefits at GÉANT, including a generous holiday allowance and a 5% end of year bonus/allowance as standard. Other benefits depend on the country you are employed in, but include an appropriate pension scheme and medical insurance.

Working Arrangements

We have adopted a flexible-hybrid model which means that employees will work flexibly between a remote and office environment. Weekly visits to the office are required for most employees to support our values and collaborative culture and enable our teams to deliver great work. For this role we anticipate that you may be required in the office for around 2 days per week.