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 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 is in an exciting phase of scaling up. Every month, more funders, publishers and

individual users find their way to our application. This means that we need to continually work on

the quality of the code, our infrastructure, and the processes that power it.

We are looking to formalize a CI pipeline, work on the scalability of our cloud infrastructure, and

integrate performance monitoring and stress testing tools. Our ideal candidate knows his way

around cloud deployments, can easily tell us what Kubernetes would improve over Docker

Compose and bring a maintainability perspective to a code review.

Are you excited about the prospect of contributing to a platform that needs to be robust, scalable

and secure?

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 scalability and DevOps work, that's a big plus.

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, Peter works at the open source project ASReview, Fabrizio contributes to the

group of Evert van Nieuwenburg in Leiden and Martijn works on the Explainability and Interpretability of Transformer AI models in the group of Jelle Zuidema (UvA).

Find out more via https://globalcampus.ai/documents/38/20260226_Vacancy_Python_Backend_Developer_Global_Campus.pdf