Data Engineer

The Oxford Internet Institute – founded in 2001 - is a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of Oxford, dedicated to the social science of the Internet. We are looking for a full stack Data Engineer to contribute to our newest project, funded by the ESRC, that will study how video game engagement is related to the mental health and well-being of players. This is a full-time post, available from 1st March 2023 for a fixed-term duration of 2 years, based in Oxford. Reporting to Professor Andrew Przybylski, the post holder will lead the development of a suite of tools, allowing a global audience of players who use popular online console and PC-based games platforms to link their player profiles and accounts to our back-end databases. The work will be conducted in collaboration with half a dozen major video game publishers including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Novel datasets including video game play telemetry and measurements of mental health will be published along with research papers, conference presentations, and reports. Special emphasis will be placed on how learnings from this research can be applied to national and international health policy and be leveraged to improve research practices of both industry and academic researchers. The post holder will:

• Lead the design of an interface that allows video game players to donate their play data for scientific study and participate scientific research.

• Work with the rest of the team to ensure that the interface can successfully work with the back-end software and API.

• Gather requirements from the partners who are involved, gaining an understanding of the datasets and how best to process them.

• Build an appropriate interface and pipeline to display the results from the project to academic, industry, and public audiences.

• Contribute where necessary to other software development tasks as required.

• Contribute to academic publications and conference presentations of the team’s work.

• Work with the full technology stack, building client-side and server-side architecture.

• Building user-friendly front-end applications.

• Developing and managing databases and applications.

• Deliver testable, maintainable, and high-quality code.

Strong JavaScript/HTML/CSS knowledge plus experience of modern JavaScript/Typescript and SQL databases essential. API design, ability to build high quality interfaces and comfortability of working with control systems also required. This work will involve close collaborations and direct technical contributions to publications, talks, and presentations focused on video games, player motivation and mental health. Full details of the requirements for this post can be found in the Job Description link below. Further queries can be directed to Professor Andrew Przybylski andy.przybylski@oii.ox.ac.uk. You will be required to upload a supporting statement, a CV, and details of two referees as part of your online application. The closing date for applications is 12.00 midday on Tuesday 28th February 2023. Interviews for those short-listed are currently planned to take place the week commencing 13th March 2023.