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.

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 position, starting in September 2025.

Duties
The Research Engineer will contribute to the development and maintenance of the ViEWS database, ViEWS forecast pipeline, which was developed under 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 writing code in Python and R and a major task will be to help organize and support these tasks. In coordination with the Research Program Manager and the Project Programmer, the Research Engineer will also be responsible for fulfilling various programming and data presentation needs for the project, following up with external consultants, providing technical oversight to the research team, performing data analysis, API development and new machine learning models development, data preparation, ensuring secure handling of research data and infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Master's degree
• At least two years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer
• Experience as a Research Engineer
• At least three years of experience programming in Python
• Excellent knowledge of GIT
• Experience of Pandas and scikit-learn libraries in Python
• Experience developing workflows for statistical analysis or machine learning in Python, R, or similar
• Very good command-line Linux knowledge
• Knowledge of statistical modeling
• Very good data analysis and data management skills
• Experience of developing visualization tools and analytics to support the presentation of research results.
• Knowledge of R and PostgreSQL
• Knowledge of MacOS
• Knowledge of LaTeX
• Experience in using high-performance computing resources (HPC)
• Experience in developing research infrastructures
• Experience in presenting research results
• Experience in processing and curating satellite/georeferenced data and good knowledge of ‘software’ and/or packages for spatial data processing (Python, R, CDO, QGIS or similar).

Furthermore, attention to detail and precision, analytical and problem-solving skills, and good interpersonal skills are of great importance. Experience as a research engineer and research assistant is an asset. The research engineer will interact extensively with the rest of the project staff and be responsible for the necessary skills development among the employees.

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 (6 months). Scope of employment: 100%. Starting date: 22 September 2025, 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 15 September 2025, UFV-PA UFV-PA 2025/2575.