Software Engineer - Text Mining

Software Engineer - Text Mining

Location: EBI - Hinxton near Cambridge, UK
Staff Category: Staff Member
Contract Duration: 3 years
Grading: 6 or 7 depending on experience and qualifications
Closing Date: 3rd June 2012
Reference number: EBI_00171

Job Description
We are looking to recruit an experienced software engineer to join the Literature Services Team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus near Cambridge in the UK.

The Literature Services Team leads the development and maintenance of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC: http://ukpmc.ac.uk), a repository of over 2 million full text biomedical research articles, supplemented with over 26 million abstracts, database links and citation information from the CiteXplore service. The content of UKPMC is also text mined for terms and relationships of interest that include gene/protein names, organisms, and diseases. New semantic/text-mining related developments are piloted in a "Labs" environment. The use of text-mining methodologies is an important approach for linking the articles in UKPMC with other public databases such as UniProt (proteins), Ensembl (genomes), PDBe (protein structures) and ArrayExpress (gene expression).

UKPMC is being developed by groups at the EBI, the British Library, and the University of Manchester and is funded by all major UK funders of biological and biomedical research, led by the Wellcome Trust.

We require a self-motivated and experienced developer to join our team. The incumbent will be responsible for engineering solutions that support text mining and related activities within the UKPMC services, liaising with text mining experts and developers working on core UKPMC services and other databases at the EBI.

Specific tasks will include:

• integrating text mining algorithms into core production pipelines;
• engineering advanced search and browse features that incorporate the outputs of textmining;
• engineering Labs infrastructure to support new developments.

The position reports to the Team Leader for Literature Services.

The EBI, part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), is a world-leading bioinformatics centre providing data to the scientific community with expertise in data storage, analysis and representation.

For further information please visit www.ebi.ac.uk

Qualifications and Experience
The successful applicant  will have a university degree in Computer Science or related field and a PhD would be beneficial. It is essential that the post-holder has the following:

• Strong mathematical and programming skills (Java essential).  
• 3 plus years experience in application development involving information retrieval, machine learning, data mining or similar.
• Experience in biomedical research and/or in scientific publishing.
• Experience in development of semantic web technologies.

The ideal candidate will need to have excellent problem solving and troubleshooting skills as well be able to work as part of a team and have the ability to operate in an international environment.

Excellent communication and interpersonal skills are a prerequisite.

Application Instructions
Please apply online via Apply Online below.

Additional Information
EMBL is an inclusive, equal opportunity employer offering attractive conditions and benefits appropriate to an international research organisation.

Please note that appointments on fixed term contracts can be renewed, depending on circumstances at the time of the review.

Note that special visa requirements apply to employees from non EU countries working at EMBL-EBI in the UK. The period of work does not qualify them for the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme.