Engineering & Application Manager 2

Are you looking for a challenging job in a dynamic team? The University of Amsterdam is seeking a Data Engineer for Full Stack Development. You will work within a highly successful research environment at the Humanities Labs (Humanities Labs - Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) - University of Amsterdam) that covers new (3D) media, digital innovation and advanced computational methods for humanities research.

Come work at our Humanities Labs!
Humanities data engineering, including creating datasets and data analysis and management infrastructures, has become a key component of digital humanities projects. Humanities data engineering requires advanced solutions, learning from the approaches in other sciences. At the same time, we also believe that humanities data engineering has specific wider contributions to make through its own research agenda in this field such as the visual analysis of complex human data. The post is an essential building block and forms the necessary backbone to publish novel data visualization pipelines, make datasets available online in an easy-to-use-way and provide a bridge to cultural institutions in Amsterdam and beyond.

What you will be doing

• Design and implement data pipelines for collecting, processing, and serving cultural and social data from various sources including APIs, web scraping (particularly social media platforms) and institutional databases;
• Build and maintain backend APIs and services for data access, analysis, and visualization of textual, geographic, and multimedia data;
• Work with geospatial data and build services for geographic analysis and visualization of historical and contemporary datasets;
• Collaborate with frontend developers to integrate data systems with user-facing research applications;
• Develop infrastructure for social media data collection and analysis, with attention to ethical and legal compliance;
• Develop and fine-tune classification models for cultural heritage data, including multimodal approaches for text, image, and metadata classification.

What we ask of you
You have advanced knowledge of designing and developing data infrastructure as well as building data pipelines. You are capable of setting up back-end infrastructures such as storage space, databases and analytic workflows. The engineer we are looking for will develop advanced facilities and be able to deal with cultural sources in various modalities, e.g., textual, (audio-)visual and 3D; requiring familiarity with state-of-the-art developments in the field. The engineer should also be able to see beyond specific applications and overview a complete data pipeline.

Knowledge of social media platforms, experience in processing data through APIs and web scraping is also essential, including an understanding of the legal/ethical position of such work. You would look forward to working in interdisciplinary teams with other data engineers, data scientists and researchers and to further developing your expertise and skillset.

Your experience and profile:

• An MA or MSc in Data Science, Digital Humanities, or in another discipline with a relevant specialisation. The degree must have been obtained by the time the position starts;
• Track record of experience of working with web, social media, historical, linguistic and cultural data;
• Experience with backend frameworks such as Django (or equivalent like Flask) and Node.js for building APIs and web services;
• Proficiency in Python for data processing and pipeline development;
• Knowledge of database systems including PostgreSQL and search engines like Elasticsearch. Familiarity with Linked Open Data standards and semantic web technologies;
• A strong plus is experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and training/deploying classification models on text, audio, or visual data is a strong plus;
• Excellent social and communication skills;
• Good command of English and Dutch (at NT2 level);
• Works accurately and independently with a problem-solving approach.

What else we offer you
We offer a temporary full-time contract as Engineering and Application Manager 2 for a period of 9 months. Preferred starting date is 1 March 2026.

The gross monthly salary based on 38 hours per week ranges from € 4728 up to a maximum of € 6433. This is exclusive 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end-of-year bonus. The starting salary will be based on qualifications, expertise and relevant experience, in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities.

Where you'll be working
The post will be based in the Humanities Labs, which brings together Creative Amsterdam (CREATE), 4D Research Lab, Conservation and Restoration Labs, Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam Music Lab, SignLab and Speech Lab. These labs, brought together from world-leading departments within the Faculty like Media Studies, History and the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, have a long-standing tradition of using advanced digital methods with the ever-growing amount of cultural and social data. Your workspace at the Humanities Labs of the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research will be the basis from which you collaborate with researchers across these labs and departments.

If you recognize yourself in the profile and are interested in the position, we look forward to receiving your application. Please send your cover letter and CV as a single PDF file. The vacancy closes on 7 january 2026. The first round of interviews will take place on 26 January 2026.

For questions about the position or department, you can contact us during office hours at:

• Prof. dr. Richard Rogers, Professor of Media Studies
• r.rogers@uva.nl