Data Engineer

Data Engineer & Developer Digital Twin Ocean

VLIZ - Flanders Marine Institute

Ostend, Belgium

You will contribute to the development of a modern, interoperable and cloud-based digital ocean infrastructure, with a focus on onboarding datasets, services, models and applications, by developing pipelines that make those efficiently usable in cloud environments.

YOUR TASKS

• You contribute to the technical development and operation of the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EDITO) infrastructure and related projects;
• You drive and support the onboarding process of datasets, data services, models and applications onto EDITO in collaboration with data specialists and researchers;
• You investigate and implement suitable cloud-optimised formats and access mechanisms for diverse types of marine data;
• You develop scalable and reliable ETL data pipelines;
• You develop and integrate APIs that make datasets and services machine readable;
• You contribute to metadata management, data discovery and cataloguing solutions;
• You work with object storage, data lakes and cloud-native access patterns for large scientific and geospatial datasets;
• You implement open standards and contribute to FAIR and open-data principles;
• You contribute code, documentation, technical guidelines and reusable onboarding procedures;
• You participate in European projects and technical working groups and represent VLIZ in relevant international technical meetings and workshops;
• You proactively build expertise in emerging technologies relevant to cloud-native data infrastructures, Digital Twins, geospatial data and distributed scientific computing.

For each function, VLIZ considers enthusiastic involvement, service minded, excellent professionalism and integrity as important characteristics.

YOUR PROFILE

• You hold a degree in computer science, informatics or engineering, or you can demonstrate equivalent via relevant experience;
• You have experience in software development, data engineering, geospatial technologies or system integration;
• You are comfortable working with one or more programming or scripting languages (i.e. Python);
• You have experience working with APIs and understand modern web-based and machine-tomachine integration patterns;
• You have practical experience with data transforming workflows and structured scientific or geospatial datasets;
• You have experience with modern collaborative software development tools and practices (i.e. Git);
• Experience with STAC, OGC standards, NetCDF, GeoJSON, GeoParquet, Zarr or related technologies is an asset;
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes or other container orchestration technologies applications is an asset;
• Experience with cloud environments, S3 object storage or data lake architectures is an asset;
• Knowledge of CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring and operational service management is an asset;
• You are able to independently investigate technical problems, compare viable solutions and translate your findings into practical implementations;
• You enjoy working across the boundaries of software development, data engineering, and infrastructure;
• You can document technical solutions clearly and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues;
• You can write fluently and communicate clearly in English;
• You enjoy collaborating within multidisciplinary and international teams.