Junior Research Operations & Reproducibility

Sport Society; Utrecht; On-site; EUR 36,000 - 46,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary according to CAO NU

8% holiday pay

8.3% year-end bonus

Pension scheme

Opportunities for growth

Job summary

Utrecht University invites applications for a Junior Research Assistant in Research Operations and Reproducibility. This part-time role will own the pipeline, maintain documentation, and support reproducible data workflows using R, R Markdown or Quarto, and GitHub; you will work with the PPBS team under Dr Flavio Azevedo and Jasmin Haggemann.

You will organize files across Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub, ensure robust reproducible reporting, and help coordinate meetings.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in social science, data science, research methods, statistics, or related field.
• At least three years of relevant experience after the Master’s degree in research data, reproducible reporting, or related work.
• Ability to independently understand, run, debug, and improve a substantial inherited workflow in R.
• Strong knowledge of R Markdown and/or Quarto, tidy data workflows, data validation, and automated report generation.
• Competent with Git and GitHub, including branches, commits, pull requests, conflict resolution, issues, and collaborative review.
• Ability to understand and maintain a research website built from a version‑controlled repository.
• Strong project‑management habits, including agenda preparation, minute‑taking, task tracking, prioritisation, and dependable follow‑through.
• Excellent written and spoken English for precise records, specifications, and implementation steps.
• Sound judgement on when to solve operational problems independently and when to escalate decisions.

Responsibilities

• Run, maintain, debug, document, and incrementally improve PPBS workflows in R and R Markdown or Quarto.
• Manage progression from raw survey exports to cleaned, labelled, processed, validated, and versioned analysis-ready datasets.
• Maintain reproducible construct reports with descriptive statistics, scale reliability, tables, figures, and transparent documentation.
• Implement and check variable recoding, value labels, missing-data rules, reverse scoring, derived variables, and cross-wave harmonisation.
• Generate and maintain empirical codebooks, data dictionaries, metadata outputs, construct specifications, and validation checks.
• Maintain the PPBS website repository and publication workflow in GitHub, including routine content updates and diagnosis of build/deployment problems.
• Organise research files and documentation across Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub with provenance, naming, versioning, access, and release status; prepare meeting agendas and minutes and track actions.
• Identify operational and reproducibility risks early and propose proportionate solutions, escalating decisions when needed.

Skills

R

R Markdown

Quarto

Git & GitHub

English communication

Project management

Data validation

Education

Master’s degree in social science or related field

Tools

Git

GitHub

RStudio

Job description

Utrecht University invites applications for a Junior Research Assistant in Research Operations and Reproducibility. This part-time role will own the pipeline, maintain documentation, and support reproducible data workflows using R, R Markdown or Quarto, and GitHub; you will work with the PPBS team under Dr Flavio Azevedo and Jasmin Haggemann.

You will organize files across Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub, ensure robust reproducible reporting, and help coordinate meetings.