System Engineer for the Einstein Telescope

Introduction
At Nikhef, approximately 195 physicists and 85 technical staff members work together in an open and international scientific environment. Together, they perform theoretical and experimental research in the fields of particle and astroparticle physics. The Nikhef institute is a collaboration between six major Dutch universities and the Dutch Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). Nikhef participates in large research collaborations, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and in experiments in the research fields of gravitational waves, cosmic rays and astroparticle physics. Knowledge and technology transfer to third parties, i.e. industry, society and the general public, is an integral part of Nikhef’s mission. 

Nikhef is co-leading the effort to build the Einstein Telescope (ET), a future third-generation gravitational wave detector. The Einstein Telescope will be built in a 10 km large dedicated underground infrastructure to mitigate disturbances caused by environmental seismic noise and will implement advanced technology, such as quantum technologies. Custom infrastructures will be built to further reduce other environmental disturbances. The main objectives for the next three years, carried out by an international collaboration co-lead by Nikhef, are the characterization of possible sites, the Technical Design Report of the observatory and complete cost evaluation of the project. 

The position
Nikhef is looking for a systems engineer with a master’s degree to work in the ET Project Office. 
The selected candidate is an interdisciplinary engineer and will take an active role in the EU-wide ET organization. The focus will be primarily on the requirements management with the consequent stakeholder analysis, the management of the requirements database, audits, and the participation to the quality and configuration activity to provide a efficient method to assure cost, schedule and quality to the project. She/he may in the future, when the ET organization is established, move to the ET organization.