Data Engineer

VIB (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie) is an entrepreneurial non-profit research institute, with a clear focus on ground-breaking strategic basic research in life sciences and operates in close partnership with the universities in Flanders.

The ICT department at VIB ensures that assets, technology, information, and data are managed securely and efficiently. Our focus includes:

• Supporting and improving the ICT infrastructure, including networks, hardware, and critical systems.
• Enabling digital transformation initiatives across the organization.
• Securing and supporting applications, information and data flows, and software integrations.
• Helping researchers and support services work efficiently through modern, reliable digital services.

To strengthen our team, VIB headquarters in Ghent is looking for a Data Engineer who will help build and evolve the data foundations that enable reliable reporting, analytics and data-driven decision-making across the organization.

About The Role

As a Data Engineer, you play a hands-on role in turning data from different business systems and sources into reliable, reusable and well-structured data solutions and data products that support reporting, analytics and other data-driven use cases across VIB. Working directly with data, pipelines, transformations, models and code, you build and implement robust and scalable data solutions as part of your day-to-day work.

The role spans the full data lifecycle, from understanding source data through data ingestion, transformation and modelling to making trusted data available for analytical consumption.

You take hands-on responsibility to the development, implementation and continuous improvement of the data solutions and data products delivered by the team. As part of a collaborative team, you build and improve these solutions while ensuring they are maintainable, testable, secure, observable and designed for reuse.

You work closely with business analysts, reporting specialists and application teams to understand both the technical characteristics and business context of data. Together, you help translate reporting, analytical and operational needs into sustainable data solutions rather than solutions built around individual reports or isolated use cases.

Reporting to the Data Analytics and Reporting Architect, you will contribute to the continued development of our data platform and engineering practices, including data quality, automation, governance and maintainability.

Our current data platform is built around Microsoft Fabric and related Microsoft technologies, while strong data engineering principles and the agility to evolve alongside changing technologies and business needs remain equally important.

Your Responsibilities

Engineering & building data solutions

• Develop and optimize scalable data pipelines and transformations across our institutional data platform.
• Build and maintain integrations that reliably bring data from different applications, systems and other sources into the data platform.
• Develop and implement data models for analytical consumption, applying appropriate data warehouse and lakehouse modelling principles.
• Build and maintain reusable data products that can support multiple reporting, analytical and other data-driven use cases across VIB.
• Write and maintain code where appropriate, while pragmatically using standard platform capabilities where these provide the most maintainable solution.
• Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues across pipelines, transformations and data products.

Quality and engineering

• Build data quality into solutions through appropriate validation, testing, monitoring and error handling.
• Ensure that data pipelines and products can be effectively monitored and that technical issues can be efficiently identified, investigated and resolved.
• Apply sound software and data engineering practices, including version control, automated deployment, testing, documentation and reusable components.
• Design and build solutions with performance, security and maintainability in mind.

Delivery & ownership

• Take hands-on ownership of the implementation and quality of data engineering solutions, from understanding source data and requirements to building, testing, deploying, monitoring and continuously improving reliable data solutions.
• Analyze technical challenges, propose practical solutions and implement them within the agreed technical and architectural principles.
• Continuously improve existing data solutions by applying simplification, standardization and sound engineering practices to increase quality and maintainability.

Collaboration & continuous improvement

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