Software engineer, data engineering (for scientific intelligence platform)

Who we are

About AcademicLabs

AcademicLabs is the go-to research landscaping platform for both industry and academia. We are a growing startup company with major ambitions, located in the heart of Ghent, Belgium. Our customers include top pharma and biotech companies of all sizes, as well as academic institutions.

Our mission is to accelerate science by giving researchers and innovation teams the tools to systematically find the right collaboration partners, new scientific innovations and make well-informed strategic decisions.

What you’ll do

Rendering the research landscape means producing accurate and complete profiles — of researchers, research groups, companies and academic organisations. As such: gathering, structuring, connecting and analysing data from many and various different research-related sources are all at the core of our company.

Your role as a data engineer will be instrumental in strengthening this core.

Responsibilities

Your overall responsibility is to take our data pipeline to the next level. This includes:

• Facilitating the process of adding and updating data from a wide variety of sources — Sources can vary wildly in terms of: data quality, data quantity, data relevance, how structured the data is, how the data is gathered, etc.
• Streamlining the workflows to extract structured information from raw, unstructured data — This involves building LLM-powered toolchains. Depending on the required scale, other means to structure data can also apply: clustering and classification analyses, entity extraction algorithms, heuristics, etc.
• Improving the disambiguation algorithms that are essential in connecting data from different sources
• Building tools to automate and streamline different data-related internal processes — capturing data from the web at scale, quality assurance tools, monitoring various data metrics, tools to produce insights/reports tailored to the customer’s needs, …
• Ensuring all of the above is done in a scalable and efficient manner

Who you are

We are looking for a talented software engineer with a passion for data. You are encouraged to apply if you meet the minimum requirements below. Any of the preferred qualifications are a welcome bonus, though not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

• 3+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering
• A strong engineering background
• Experienced working with data at scale (in the order of 100M+ documents, 1B+ relations)
• Experienced with document-oriented and relational databases (for example Mongo and Postgres)
• Fluent Python speaker
• Fluent English speaker
• A good blend of being thorough, yet pragmatic
• A “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” mentality — We are a small team, so you’ll be given a lot of agency in your role, expected to take initiative and ownership.
• Ability to clearly communicate ideas and feedback cross-functionally
• Eternally curious and hungry to learn

Preferred extra qualifications

• Prior experience in the research, academic, R&D or life sciences domain
• The position is available as a remote position. It is however preferable you can make it to the office on an as-needed/as-desired basis.
• Experience using AWS (or other cloud compute platforms) — ECR, ECS, EC2, RDS, S3, Cloudwatch, …
• Experience using Elasticsearch
• Familiarity with data warehouses and business intelligence solutions
• Familiarity with distributed frameworks like Spark or Hadoop