"Research assistant: data and software engineering for smart energy applications"

KU Leuven / Department Electrical Engineering (ESAT) / research division ELECTA is looking to hire a full-time data and (cloud) software engineer to participate in the EFRO SmarThor project which is the digital spine of our smart energy applications in our EnergyVille research centre. SmarThor is the cloud-based data platform for the Open Thor Living Lab, situated in the Thor Park in Genk (BE). It provides state-of-the-art infrastructure in which innovative energy solutions are developed and tested in a unique interaction with scientific institutions, companies, educational partners, governments, and local citizens. SmarThor is a custom data platform that collects, hosts, and provisions all (time series) data related to the Open Thor Living Lab. It is implemented on top of a commercial PaaS offering and features data ingestion services, time series data clusters, management and data APIs and Web apps, and dashboards for data visualization and system monitoring. The open position involves both participation in the continuing development of the SmarThor platform, as well as data analytics tasks related to the Open Thor Living Lab.

Unit website

Responsibilities

• Participate in workshops with potential partners of the Open Thor Living Lab to (i) analyze how SmarThor can be of value to evaluate their products and services in the living lab, and (ii) translate this into technical requirements
• Perform data analysis tasks to evaluate the quality of available data sets in SmarThor and propose improvements
• Design and implement related software components, such as data and control APIs, and data processing pipelines for the cloud-based architecture
• Follow-up on the general development and maintenance of the SmarThor data platform
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Profile

We are looking for a passionate data and software engineer

• with experience with cloud platforms (preferably Microsoft Azure)
• with good knowledge of, and experience in (the development of) distributed systems, data engineering systems, DevOps, and data analytics
• experienced in Python and its data analytics tools; additional experience in C# and .NET is considered a plus
• having a thorough and systematic approach to development of production-ready software and systems
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Offer

We offer you a two-year position on the EFRO-funding as a researcher (barema 43), which could possibly evolve into a PhD track, given the right motivation and quality of work.

• You will work in close collaboration with the SmarThor team at EnergyVille, consisting of KU Leuven and VITO software engineers and researchers.
• The working location is the recent research building EnergyVille in Genk, where you're expected to be 2-3 days per week, while you can telework for the remaining days.
• The working language is English

EnergyVille is an inspiring international environment in which you can contribute to the state-of-the-art developments in the ongoing energy transition!

Interested

For more information please contact Prof. dr. ir. Geert Deconinck, tel.: +32 16 32 11 26, mail: geert.deconinck@kuleuven.be or Dr. Klaas Thoelen, tel.: +32 16 32 76 68, mail: klaas.thoelen@kuleuven.be.