Research engineer

Research engineer

The department
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. 90 persons are employed at the Department and approximately 1000 students are enrolled every academic year. Courses offered include undergraduate and post-graduate courses, as well as a Ph.D. programme. For more information, visit www.pcr.uu.se.

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The research program
Societies at risk started up in January 2022 with funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. It will run through 2027 (www.pcr.uu.se/research/sar/). This multi-disciplinary program, led by Research Program Leader Håvard Hegre, takes a risk-analysis perspective, studying the expected impact of armed conflict as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. The goal is to assess the effects of conflict at both the macro and micro level on economies, health, water security, political institutions, human rights, forced migration, socio-psychological well-being, and gender equality. Conflict hazard will be modeled through an early warning system that expands the well-established ViEWS system (www.viewsforecasting.org), to forecast political violence and its impacts on a range of societal outcomes. The research program collaborates closely with research projects at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (www.prio.org/projects/1977).

The department and the research program Societies at Risk, now seek to hire 1 research engineer for a temporary employment, starting in June 2024.

Duties
The research engineer will contribute to developing and maintaining the VIEWS database and the ViEWS forecasting pipeline, which were developed during the ERC project ViEWS – a political Violence Early-Warning System (www.views.pcr.uu.se), (www.viewsforecasting.org).
All development will be done on GitHub. The project has several researchers and research assistants that write code in Python and R, and a major task will thus be to help organize and support these development efforts. In coordination with the research program leader and the project programmer, the research engineer will also be responsible for meeting various programming and data presentation needs of the project, following up with external consultants, and providing technical support to the research group, conducting data analysis, API and new machine-learning models development, data ingestion, ensuring safe handling of research data and infrastructure.

Requirements

• Master’s degree
• At least two years of programming experience in Python
• Excellent knowledge of GIT
• Experience with the Pandas and scikit-learn libraries in Python
• Experience developing statistical analysis or machine learning workflows in Python, R or similar
• Very good knowledge of Linux on the command line
• Knowledge of statistical modelling
• Very good skills in data analysis and management
• Experience in developing visualisation tools and analytics to support the presentation of research findings.

Additional qualifications

• Knowledge of R and PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with MacOS
• Familiarity with LaTeX
• Experience using high performance computing (HPC) resources
• Experience with developing research infrastructures
• Experience with presentation of research results
• Experience in processing and curating satellite/geo-referenced data and good knowledge of software and/or packages for spatial data processing (Python, R, CDO, QGIS or similar).

Attention to detail and exactness, analytical and problem-solving skills, and good interpersonal abilities are of high importance. Experience as a research engineer is also meritorious. The research engineer will interact to a high extent with the rest of the project staff and will be responsible for necessary skill development among project members.

The application
The application must contain a personal letter clarifying why you are interested in the position (1 page), as well as a CV.

About the employment
The employment is a: temporary position (12 months). Scope of employment: 100%. Starting date: 1 June 2024, or as agreed. Placement: Uppsala.

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

Please submit your application by 6 May 2024, UFV-PA 2024/1099.

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