Data Scientist

Our Mission

At Global Campus, we believe in the potential of academic research to solve the major challenges of our time. Finding robust academic knowledge should be easy. This is why we apply insights from the frontier of AI to find expertise on the level of an author, a journal or an individual paper. Global Campus is used by the Champions League of Research Funders, such as the ERC, but also by foundations like the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF) to combat cancer with new research.

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!

Who Global Campus helps:

-          (Society) publishers to find peer reviewers for their manuscripts

-          Universities to find new candidates for hard-to-fill vacancies

-          Funding agencies to find grant referees for research proposals

-          Individual researchers find exciting collaborators across the globe.

About the company

Global Campus started 3.5 years ago, in December 2022, but the founders Tijmen and Paul have been working together with several initiatives serving academia since 2012. Global Campus has a small team of 7, of which 5 developers. We are based in Utrecht at the Dotslash scale-up campus and all work at least 1 day per week in the office.

Lunches in the office are typically together and we share our floor with two other startups. Our clients are global with customers mainly in the United States and Europe and collaboration partners in Germany and the UK. The first year of the company was mainly about validating the concept, the second year about integrations with other systems to serve a broader audience of potential customers. Last year was about growing and that's the aim for 2026 as well!

About this position

Global Campus builds on top of data from OpenAlex. OpenAlex is a huge and open bibliometric datasource, containing information on scientific articles, their authors, their funding and their institutions. It’s a fantastic resource, but not without its data challenges. In order to serve our customers with trustworthy, real-time data, we run additional pipelines, data quality and enrichment algorithms.

As a Data Scientist, you will be designing and running experiments to see if we can build a gold standard from noisy data and if our algorithms can best approach matching that gold standard. While implementing these algorithms, you’ll work together with our backend development team to ensure that they beat the benchmarks and deploy at scale. That scale, terabytes of textual data, comes with its own set of challenges.

Can you think of smart approaches for author disambiguation? Do you like finding thorny problems and exceptions in huge datasets, and devising smart ways of fixing those? Then come join us at Global Campus to help others navigate the fascinating world of academia!

Job requirements

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. If you do bring experience of working with large data, or even bibliometric data, that’s a benefit.

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 is helpful, but if you’re not – don’t let that hold you back. The stack we use: Python (Django) for the application, Java/C++ (Vespa) for search, Javascript (VueJS) for our frontend, Airflow for our data pipelines and Docker in Azure/Scaleway clouds for DevOps.

Opportunities

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

A day for your Development

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 work week. For instance, Fabrizio contributes to the group of Evert van Nieuwenburg in Leiden and Martin works on the WooZm project with David Graus of the University of Amsterdam.

How to apply?

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

Read more about the application, including a salary indication, at our website: https://globalcampus.ai/contact-us/vacancies/

Applications are open until at least Friday August 17 th , 2026, but since we’re launching this in the middle of the Summer Holidays season, we might keep it open for a bit longer.