Royal Academy of Sciences | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Software Engineer | Full-time, onsite only, Visa | $40K – $60K
Build open source software that slowly but surely links all historical data in Europe together
We're a team of engineers at the Royal Academy of Sciences in the Netherlands. We build (or implement) Open Source SaaS software that allows users to work their data[1][2]. We're looking for front-end / back-end engineers (we prefer people who like a little bit of both) to add features for exposing the data (search, visualisation) and for working with the data (distributes storage, reasoning/inferring knowledge).
Examples of problems we tackle:
- Given that you have about a million mentions of names in notarial archives of the 17th century, can you make an educated guess at which of those mentions are about the same person? Please note: spelling was optional back then. Birthdates were approximations as well.
- Given that you have two scanned pieces of parchment with handwritten text. Can you detect if they were written by the same author? Can you detect what constitutes the "main" writing and what are the reader's notes?
- Can you extract all mentions of places, people and events from a text. Can you do it with a lexicon that changes over time?
- Given a 12km archive of decisions of a legislative body. Can you use network analysis to find clicques based on voting patterns?
As you can see most of these problems are not "novel" per sé, but they are often made a tad more difficult by the historical aspect. And they sure are fun :)
We provide an environment where people enjoy freedom of work, where our clients understand the uncertainty of experimentation (they're researchers after all) and where all code is published under an open-source license.
We're using python and java (yes, voluntarily), react (I know, sooo 2016) and we're hosting on kubernetes. We don't really care if you've used these exact technologies before, but we do care if you have built up greenfield applications as well as to have worked on applications that have been in development for a few years.
Contract benefits: other then what you get in any Dutch company (which is pretty good, especially for US standards) we provide you with a 38 hour workweek and 30 paid holidays (outside of the national holidays such as christmas)
Interview process: you send us some examples of real applications you wrote - phone interview - at a later date a technical challenge (in person or screenshare) - final interview (finalizing the agreement)
Drop me a line at jauco.noordzij . di.huc.knaw.nl!
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