Junior Research Software Engineer for Sustainable Tools

Qabird; Leiden; Hybrid; EUR 41,000 - 56,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working options

Home-working allowance

Laptop provided

ABP pension

Job summary

Leiden University's Institute of Environmental Science (CML) seeks a Junior Research Software Engineer to design, build, and maintain dashboards, APIs, and visual analytics for sustainability research. You will work with researchers to turn scientific insights into usable tools while supporting reproducible workflows and FAIR data practices.

You will collaborate with senior RSEs, PIs, and PhDs to strengthen the software engineering basis of CML, contributing to open science and impactful

Qualifications

• MSc in computer science, data science, AI, environmental informatics, or related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript; other languages are a plus.
• Experience with front-end frameworks (React) and data visualization (D3/Plotly).
• Experience building back-end APIs (FastAPI, Django, Flask) and integrating SQL/NoSQL databases.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and reproducibility tools.
• Excellent collaboration skills, service mindset, and interest in environmental applications and open science.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scientific software, web apps, and dashboards for research dissemination and policy communication.
• Support data pipelines and reproducible workflows for environmental analytics.
• Collaborate with researchers to scope features and ensure usability and accessibility.
• Assist deployment in cloud/open environments (containerized services) with infrastructure alignment.
• Promote FAIR data and software practices, version control (Git/GitHub), testing (pytest), packaging, and documentation.

Skills

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

React

Data visualization

APIs (FastAPI/Django/Flask)

SQL/NoSQL databases

Git/GitHub

Docker

Open source contributions

Collaboration

Education

MSc in computer science, data science, AI, environmental informatics, or related field

Tools

Docker

Git

GitHub

pytest

Job description

Leiden University's Institute of Environmental Science (CML) seeks a Junior Research Software Engineer to design, build, and maintain dashboards, APIs, and visual analytics for sustainability research. You will work with researchers to turn scientific insights into usable tools while supporting reproducible workflows and FAIR data practices.

You will collaborate with senior RSEs, PIs, and PhDs to strengthen the software engineering basis of CML, contributing to open science and impactful