Programmer, Department of Peace and Conflict Research - Hiring in process/Finished, not possible to apply

The Department of Peace and Conflict Research was established in 1971 to conduct peace research and offer courses in peace and conflict studies. Currently approx. 80 persons are employed at the Department and at present some 300-400 students are enrolled every academic year. Courses offered include undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as a PhD programme. For more information, visit http://www.pcr.uu.se

We now seek a programmer to work with the project ViEWS and The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). 

About ViEWS – a political Violence Early-Warning System
The project started up in January 2017 with financial support from the European Research Council and will run through 2021. The project applies machine-learning methods to estimate the probabilities of the three types of violence coded by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). ViEWS has since June 2018 published monthly updated assessments on the risk of violence in Africa. The project is described in detail at: http://views.pcr.uu.se. Much of the current source code is found on GitHub.  

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)
UCDP is the world’s main provider of data on organised violence and the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war, with a history of almost 40 years. Its definition of armed conflict has become the global standard of how conflicts are systematically defined and studied. The project is described in detail at: https://ucdp.uu.se/.

Expected tasks:
The programmer will be responsible for continuously developing and maintaining the ViEWS database, the ViEWS forecasting pipeline, and documenting the processes on GitHub. The programmer will also support the continued development of the UCDP database, and the linking of both ViEWs and UCDP to a new national research infrastructure. The two projects have several researchers and research assistants that write code in Python and R, and a major task will thus be to help organise and support these development efforts.

The programmer will also be responsible for meeting various programming and data presentation needs of the projects, following up with external consultants, and providing technical supervision to the research group. The tasks will also include conducting data analysis, interacting with IT-service suppliers, ensuring safe handling of research data and infrastructure in coordination with the project leader, and defining current and future infrastructure needs in the two projects.

Qualifications and required skills:

• Bachelor degree in any field 
• Extensive experience with programming tasks 
• At least two years of programming experience in Python and SQL
• Familiarity with R and PostgreSQL
• Experience developing statistical analysis or machine learning workflows in Python, R or similar
• Familiarity with Linux on the command line
• Knowledge of statistical modelling

Desirable/additional qualifications:

• Experience with the Pandas and scikit-learn libraries in Python
• Familiarity with MacOS
• Familiarity with LaTeX
• Experience using high performance computing (HPC) resources
• Experience with developing research infrastructures
• Experience with presentation of research results
• Knowledge of peace and conflict research or other social sciences

Attention to detail and exactness, analytical and problem-solving skills, and good interpersonal abilities are of high importance. The programmer will interact to a high extent with the rest of the project staff and will be responsible for necessary skill development among project members. Demonstrated pedagogical skills are therefore of high importance.

Salary: Individual salary.

Starting date: 1 September 2020, or as otherwise agreed.

Type of employment: Temporary position ending 30 September 2021 (13 months).

Scope of employment: 100 %

For further information about the position please contact: Håvard Hegre, havard.hegre@pcr.uu.se 

Please submit your application by 10 August 2020, UFV-PA 2020/2499.

Are you considering moving to Sweden to work at Uppsala University? If so, you will find a lot of information about working and living in Sweden at www.uu.se/joinus. You are also welcome to contact International Faculty and Staff Services at ifss@uadm.uu.se.