Senior Research Operations & Reproducibility Lead

Utrecht University; Netherlands; On-site; EUR 36,000 - 46,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension scheme

Flexible leave arrangements

Personal and professional growth

8% holiday pay

8.3% year-end bonus

Job summary

Utrecht University seeks a Senior Research Assistant to own the reproducible data pipeline and reporting infrastructure within the PPBS project. You will maintain the public website, shared research infrastructure, and implement decisions into reliable follow-through.

You will work under the direction of PPBS leaders and embedded researchers, independently managing technical operations while scientific choices remain with supervisors. Strong R, Git, and project management are essential.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or equivalent professional experience in social science, data science, 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 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.
• Experience cleaning, recoding, labeling, documenting, and quality-checking complex survey or social-science data.
• Proficiency with Git and GitHub, including branches, commits, pull requests, conflicts, and collaboration.
• Ability to understand and maintain a research website built from a version-controlled repository.
• Strong project-management habits: agenda, minute-taking, task tracking, prioritisation, follow-through.
• Fluent written and spoken English for precise records and implementation steps.
• Good judgement on when to solve operational problems and when to elevate scientific decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical operation of the reproducible data pipeline and reports.
• Maintain PPBS website repository and publication workflow in GitHub.
• Organise research files across Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub with provenance and versioning.
• Prepare meeting agendas and minutes; track decisions and dependencies; follow up with contributors.
• Identify risks early and propose proportionate solutions; escalate as needed.
• Ensure pipeline is organized, documented, reproducible, and moving forward.

Skills

R programming

Data wrangling

Reproducible reporting

Git versioning

English communication

Project management

Education

Master’s degree in social science or related field

Tools

Git

GitHub

R

R Markdown

Quarto

Job description

Utrecht University seeks a Senior Research Assistant to own the reproducible data pipeline and reporting infrastructure within the PPBS project. You will maintain the public website, shared research infrastructure, and implement decisions into reliable follow-through.

You will work under the direction of PPBS leaders and embedded researchers, independently managing technical operations while scientific choices remain with supervisors. Strong R, Git, and project management are essential.