The Department of Media Studies of the Faculty of Humanities has a vacancy for an All-round developer for web Research.

What are you going to do?

Candidates are academic and technical jacks of all trades, interested in the latest developments in data analysis and web technology and inclined towards experimenting with these. The ideal candidate is not afraid to dive into data flows, explore APIs, scrape data, and merge data frames. The candidate is able to work effectively independently as well as in teams, and is willing to take the initiative and clearly communicate with other (academic) staff. 

As a developer, you will develop and maintain experimental and educational research tools to support the work of the department and the Digital Methods Initiative, a world-leading research group led by prof. Richard Rogers. These tools include scrapers for many search engines and websites, as well as software to map hyperlink networks, and the Internet Censorship Explorer. You will additionally work on the development, maintenance and documentation of social media research tools that capture and analyse data from platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, 4chan and Reddit. Furthermore, you play an important role in the development of new tools oriented towards visual analysis and machine learning-based analysis of social media data, and you do so in close collaboration with many different researchers in various disciplines.

What do we require?

- Hbo/university level, preferably with a BA in a relevant field, e.g. Artificial Intelligence;

- experience with, or willing to learn:

• information retrieval and data mining (web crawling, screen scraping) and data analysis (both exploratory and hypothesis driven)
• big data storage, caching and analysis (via BigQuery, Compute Engine, AWS)
• Python, JavaScript, PHP, Docker
• NoSQL (MongoDB), MySQL/PostgreSQL
• VueJS, Socket.io, Scrapy, Pytorch
• Linux, Apache

Our offer

A fixed-term one-year contract (22.8 hours per week/0.6 FTE) with the intention of converting it into a permanent contract after a positive assessment.

Gross salary ranges from €2,790 to €4,402 (salary level 10) based on full-time employment (38 hours per week) depending on your relevant experience. 

The ideal starting date is 1 March 2021 or shortly thereafter.

We additionally offer an extensive package of secondary employee benefits, including a generous holiday scheme (8%) and year-end bonus (8.3%). Because we value your continued personal development and professionalisation, we also offer excellent opportunities for study and development. 

The relevant job profile (UFO) is Developer ICT 3.

The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities applies.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Humanities – Department of Media Studies

The faculty of Humanities offers a range of BA and MA programmes with a strong international profile and a large number of disciplines in the field of language and culture. Its research covers all important subdisciplines of the Humanities.