Senior Research Operations & Reproducibility Specialist

EURAXESS Ireland; Utrecht; Hybrid; EUR 36,000 - 46,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

8% holiday pay

8.3% year-end bonus

Pension scheme

Job summary

Utrecht University seeks a Senior Research Assistant in Research Operations and Reproducibility to own the technical operation of the PPBS data pipeline. You will ensure reproducible, well‑documented workflows in R, manage data provenance, and maintain research‑website infrastructure while collaborating with senior researchers.

You will work 20–24 hours per week, with a gross monthly salary within the CAO NU range, and report to the PPBS leadership.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent professional experience.
• At least three years of relevant experience in research data and reproducible reporting.
• Ability to understand, run, debug, and improve inherited R workflows.
• Strong knowledge of R Markdown and/or Quarto, tidy data workflows, and automated reporting.
• Experience cleaning and labeling complex survey or social-science data.
• Proficient with Git and GitHub and collaborative review processes.
• Ability to maintain a research website built from a version-controlled repo.
• Strong project-management, agenda prep, minute-taking, and task tracking.

Responsibilities

• Run, debug, document, and incrementally improve PPBS workflows in R and Quarto.
• Manage progression from raw exports to cleaned, labeled, analyzed datasets.
• Maintain reproducible reports with statistics, scales, tables, figures, and docs.
• Implement variable recoding, labeling, missing data rules, and harmonisation.
• Create and maintain codebooks, data dictionaries, and validation checks.
• Maintain the PPBS website repository and publication workflow in GitHub.
• Organise research files across Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub with provenance.
• Prepare meeting agendas/minutes, track actions, and coordinate hand-offs.
• Identify risks early and propose proportionate operational solutions.

Skills

R skills

R Markdown/Quarto

Git and GitHub

English communication

Project management

Workflow maintenance

Education

Master’s degree in social science / data science / research methods / statistics

Tools

GitHub

Job description

Utrecht University seeks a Senior Research Assistant in Research Operations and Reproducibility to own the technical operation of the PPBS data pipeline. You will ensure reproducible, well‑documented workflows in R, manage data provenance, and maintain research‑website infrastructure while collaborating with senior researchers.

You will work 20–24 hours per week, with a gross monthly salary within the CAO NU range, and report to the PPBS leadership.