As a technician, you will coordinate the maintenance of the compute platform consisting of bioinformatics software, virtual machines, and local and remote servers and cloud computing services. In other words, your key task will be to maintain the department’s computer and services infrastructure. This includes installation, automatic backups, frequently required updates of the computer ‘fleet’ and the deployment of cloud, cluster, and other virtualisation solutions. Research in the group focuses on nutrition, toxicology, metabolic diseases, and rare diseases. It uses FAIR data and federated semantic web reasoning methods, modern biological “omics” analysis methods which are complemented by more traditional (multivariate) statistics and machine learning.

You will be responsible for:

1. the monitoring and maintaining the up-time of all our servers and the services running on those
2. maintaining the department’s computer infrastructure. This includes installation, automatic backups, frequently required updates of the computer “fleet”, and deploying cloud, cluster, and other novel virtualization solutions
3. maintaining servers located at other geographic locations
4. maintaining contacts with other technical partners in our internal, national, and international collaborations
5. directing and engaging communications between the department and the ICT department of Maastricht University, and
6. support internal research and services, like SPARQL endpoint, Mediawiki and Jenkins.

And of course, you’ll keep up to date with the latest developments in computer science, particularly those relevant to bioinformatics.

You are a BSc / Msc who is able to:

• work with GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac
• Configure and maintain computing platforms (cloud solutions, docker, OpenShift, etc)
• cope with the rapid development in bioinformatics
• maintain and set up code development support tools
• introduce ICT solutions to bioinformaticians
• Thrive in an international environment
• promote FAIR data and Open Science

Fixed-term contract: 1 year, with a 2 years extension after a positive evaluation.

Initially we offer you a one-year contract, but after a positive evaluation at the end of this year, we would like to offer you an extention of the contract with two more years. 

Remuneration will be according to standard salary levels, depending on education and relevant work experience. This implies a gross monthly salary of minimum € 2261 and maximum € 3445, according to scale 7 or 8 of CAO NU (Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities).

Maastricht University offers an attractive benefits package with additional holiday (8%) and end-of-year bonuses (8.3%), training, and career development. For more information: UM employees.

Maastricht University

Maastricht University is renowned for its unique, innovative, problem-based learning system, which is characterized by a small-scale and student-oriented approach. Research at UM is characterized by a multidisciplinary and thematic approach, and is concentrated in research institutes and schools. Maastricht University has around 18,000 students and 4,300 employees. Reflecting the university's strong international profile, a fair amount of both students and staff are from abroad. The university hosts 6 faculties: Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Faculty of Law, School of Business and Economics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Department of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT

The Department of Bioinformatics-BiGCaT is part of NUTRIM School of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences. It was founded in 2001 by Prof. dr. Chris Evelo aiming at employing bioinformatics approaches in systems biology to integrate experimental data and data with current knowledge. Integrative Systems Biology is being developed and applied in various research fields. The department has four core research areas; 1) metabolic diseases, 2) micronutrients, 3) toxicity and risk assessment and 4) rare diseases. Within these areas, different types of data, like transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and (epi)genomics data, are integrated and combined with existing knowledge.

Chris Evelo’s BiGCaT group is involved in (inter)national initiatives to collect, share and integrate biological data. Moreover, in order to perform data analysis in a state-of-the-art manner, novel methods and tools are being developed. These include:

• high-throughput data analysis pipelines,
• semantic Web tools using RDF, ontologies and SPARQL,
• bioinformatics and cheminformatics software,
• structuring and collecting biological processes in WikiPathways,
• pathway analysis in PathVisio and vi) network analysis in Cytoscape.
• web services for all the above

School of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism

NUTRIM aims to contribute to health maintenance and personalised medicine by unraveling lifestyle and disease-induced derangements in metabolism and by developing targeted nutritional, exercise and drug interventions.

This is facilitated by a state of the art research infrastructure and close interaction between scientists, clinicians, master and PhD students (in 2019: 395 researchers, including 245 PhD students, and 70 support staff) with a total annual budget of €18M and more than 500 publications in Science Citation indexed journals.

https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/school-nutrition-and-translational-research-metabolism