Structured Data Frontend Engineer

Are you a Software Engineer with a big interest in frontends and data wrangling and love creating stable production code? Do you like full stack development and building frontends to be used by domain experts and the public? Do you also like languages and/or history a bit? Then this job opening might be just the right fit for you, and we invite you to send us a message about our vacancy.

The Digital Infrastructure department at the KNAW Humanities Cluster in Amsterdam is looking for a Structured Data Frontend Engineer, 30,4 - 38 hours per week (0,8 - 1.0 FTE).

Job description:

We are looking to strengthen our development teams. We design and build open source software that allows our academic colleagues in the humanities and social sciences to address new research questions using innovative new technical methods. This research draws on large, rich, and heterogeneous humanities data collections and carves its place in the evolving (European) research infrastructures. We welcome applications from research software engineers who can help us to manage data about millions of entities and their multi-faceted views found in museums, libraries, and archives.

Typically, you will be working with datasets of an historical or linguistic nature. This leads to a high degree of diversity, ranging from unstructured blobs of text to highly structured personalia and everything in between. These datasets are valuable research assets and need to be safely stored, curated and made accessible, which all are within the responsibility of our team. We often also build the frontend to create and serve the data to the generic public or the scientific community. This makes our work span the full stack from storage to browser.

Skills we are looking for:

• Frontend: React, CSS, browser-based JavaScript/TypeScript
• Backend: Python and/or Java and JavaScript/TypeScript
• Data management using a wide range of DBMSs, e.g., PostgreSQL, MariaDB, NOSQL, triple stores
• Linked Data/Semantic Web experience will be highly valuable
• Fluency in English (Dutch is appreciated)
• and some other things that are useful but can be learned: Docker, Kubernetes, React, html, git, bash, and Linux in general

Formally you will be part of the structured data team, in a department made up of a group of circa 30, generally awesome, international, smart people. You will work together with humanities and social science researchers from the three Humanities Cluster institutes.

Why work at the KNAW Humanities Cluster?

The Digital Infrastructure (DI) department is a great place to work. It has one of the largest software teams in Europe at the intersection of humanities research and IT. We work on national and international infrastructures with unique data from leading institutes in the Netherlands and abroad. It is a unique environment where research, data and software always go hand in hand. All our code is published under an open-source license. The department is a part of the Humanities Cluster (HuC) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The HuC was formed in 2016 by three internationally leading research institutes in the social sciences and humanities: The Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, the Meertens Institute, and the International Institute for Social History (IISH). We welcome and support a variety of development & networking opportunities, such as presenting and publishing the results of your work, working with engineers in different teams and areas of expertise, or engaging directly with researchers in the humanities cluster who developing new projects and grant applications.