At Global Campus, we believe in the power of academic research to solve the major challenges of our time. Finding robust academic knowledge should be easy. We apply insights from the world of AI to help people find the academic expertise they need.

Global Campus is used by:

• Funding agencies to find grant referees for research proposals
• Academic publishers to find peer reviewers for new manuscripts
• Universities to find new candidates for hard-to-fill vacancies
• Individual researchers to find exciting collaborators across the globe.

Do you share our belief in the power of science? Would you like to contribute to collaboration in research by building software that people love to use? Then this is a position for you!

A lot of our development is determined by what our clients need. This means that we create new features in close collaboration with the individuals that use Global Campus daily. There is a growing need for other systems (such as grant or manuscript submission systems) to communicate with Global Campus through our API.

At the same time, we need to ensure that Global Campus can handle the rapidly increasing user base, which means that we need to employ testable and scalable techniques and technologies.

We expect most of the work to be focused on our backend, which is built in Python Django (using Django Rest Framework and a Postgres SQL database). However, we want to give you the freedom and agency to develop your skills in a direction that you like, for instance:

• DevOps: With an increasing (and increasingly international) userbase, we anticipate challenges in scaling our server infrastructure. If you think it’s cool to think about servers handling a lot of load, this could be a direction to develop into.
• Frontend work: While most new features are backend-heavy, we pride ourselves on having a frontend that is easy to work with and nice to look at. If you are interested in building your frontend skills, this is another potential specialization.
• Data pipelines and Machine learning: We have a number of workflows that collect and connect open data, where we could improve efficiency and variety. Additionally, as we gather ever more insights into which matches are a good fit for a particular query, there is also room to improve the AI models we use on our own data.

We believe a lot of learning is done on the job, and we prefer talent over experience. A hard requirement for applying is an affinity with programming or logical thinking. It’s also important to have an interest in academia, as that’s the world that you’ll be operating in.

We’re an international team, so speaking Dutch is not a requirement (but can be helpful with some of our clients).

If you’re versed in parts of our technology stack, this can be a plus, but if you’re not – don’t let that hold you back. The stack we use: Python (Django) for the application, Java (Vespa) for search, Javascript (VueJS) for our frontend, Airflow for our data pipelines and Docker in AWS and Azure clouds for DevOps.

Since we are a small company, a lot of work is done on the fly. This means few meetings and a lot of opportunity to shape your own activities. The startup environment can be dynamic and messy, but it is also free and energetic.

All of our developers spend 20% of their time at an external partner (often university groups). Not only does this provide an important opportunity for learning, it also brings variety to your week.
For instance, Peter works at the open source project ASReview (UU), and Martijn works on the Explainability and Interpretability of Transformer AI models in the group of Jelle Zuidema (UvA), you can find some of their work here.

Between €3.000,- and €3.500,- per month plus benefits for a fulltime contract.
Benefits include a development day (20% of your time) to be spent on an external project of your choosing. You also get a laptop, free lunches, Friday drinks and much more like working out on the campus on Tuesday evenings and lots of events!

If you are interested, please reach out to Tijmen (tijmen[at]globalcampus.ai) and tell him why you are interested in this position! And if you can include a brief CV, that would be great.

Are you more experienced, but still triggered by what we do? Then please reach out for a chat, too!

Applications are open until at least April 25th, 2025. Though flexible, we are aiming for a starting date in June or July.