Job no: 520699
Position Type: Staff Full Time
Campus: UMass Boston
Department: SFE – Dean’s Office
Pay Grade: 30
Date opened: 20 Sep 2023 Eastern Daylight Time
Applications close: 06 Oct 2023 Eastern Daylight Time

The Stone Living Lab (https://stonelivinglab.org/), a multi-institution partnership researching coastal defense in the face of sea level rise, seeks a data manager to work with its scientists at UMass Boston. As the Stone Living Lab (SLL) pursues its scientific mission, the principal investigators (PIs) and students involved are generating a wealth of data in a wide variety of formats. In order to maximize the use of our data across multiple lab groups, we are seeking a data manager to help us curate, manage, and make publicly accessible our data in a way that obeys FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) best practices. We are seeking someone who will work with the PIs and associated researchers with the creation, organization, and maintenance of the SLL data management process as well as generation of public-facing products using this data. Further, we hope to host our data on either the Environmental Data Repository (https://edirepository.org/) or Data One (https://www.dataone.org/services/), to provide long-term public availability, robust metadata generation, and open APIs.

This is a grant funded position with a current end date of May 24, 2024, subject to renewal contingent on funding and university needs with benefits and a salary of ~$80,000 per year.

General Summary:

• Determine the optimal data hosting and delivery solutions that follow best practices for the international data community.
• Work with scientists on data quality control and help them to prepare metadata for each data product they produce.
• Work with scientists to archive data and/or create archiving protocols and pipelines for future use.
• Work with real-time data streams to establish data pipelines that quality control the data before providing them to the public.
• Create a searchable and publicly accessible data portal of all SLL data products.
• Work with scientists and the outreach and engagement team to develop web applications and data products for public use.
• Work to create pipelines between SLL data and the Ocean Biogeographic Information Service (OBIS) and the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) for international representation of SLL data.
• Train SLL scientists in best practices for future data archiving, so that all work done at SLL into the future is in accordance with FAIR principles.

Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree or above required. Preferred degree in computer science, data science, or IT with a focus on data management. Degrees in ecology, evolution, environmental science, oceanography, etc. are also preferred if the candidate has demonstrated experience in data management.
• Relevant coursework and/or experience in data management preferred.
• Familiarity with Ecological Meta-Language (EML).
• Experience with Excel, SQL, R.
• Experience with R Shiny is a plus.
• Knowledge of web content management systems interfacing with relational database systems using common programming languages.
• Strong communication and organizational skills.
• Ability to work independently.
• Experience with data management in a single lab or multi-lab environment.
• Familiarity with major data hosting platforms for Ecological or other environmental data streams (e.g., Data One, OBIS, EDI, or others).
• Experience with tabular, imagery, raster, video, and other data formats.
• Good written communication/documentation skills.

Position Duration: This is a grant funded position of 9 months duration from start date with renewal for a full year and for future years contingent on funding. Start date ideally no later than November 1, 2023.

Application Instructions: 

See https://employmentopportunities.umb.edu/boston/en-us/job/520699/data-manager-stone-living-lab or contact Jarrett.Byrnes@umb.edu for more details.

Please apply online with your resume, cover letter and list of three professional references.

Review of candidates will begin following the application closing date. 

Only Internal candidates in the Professional Staff Bargaining Unit will be considered during the first 10 business days of the posting.  All other candidates will be considered after that period. 

Salary Ranges for the appropriate Pay Grade can be found at the following link: 

Grade: 30             

Salary Ranges

This is an exempt union position. This is a grant funded position with a current end date of May 24, 2024, subject to renewal contingent on funding and university needs.

All official salary offers must be approved by Human Resources.

UMass Boston is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, we will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact the ADA/504 Coordinator Andrea Haas  or 617-287-5148.

UMass Boston is an urban public research university with a teaching soul, whose impact is both local and global. We are the third most diverse university in the country – more than 60% of our undergraduate students come from minoritized communities and groups and more than half of our students are the first in their families to attend a college or university. Thus, our students come to us from richly diverse life experiences and backgrounds; they bring to our classrooms and research settings the robust range of perspectives growing out of the socio-cultural, economic, and historical contexts in which they have lived, along with the challenges they encounter, engage, and strive to overcome. We invite applications from candidates who engage the diverse life experiences of our student body, who appreciate that students bring their holistic selves into the academic setting, and who recognize and articulate how their own life experiences and backgrounds have shaped their journeys, practices, and commitments as researchers, scholars, and educators.

Applications close: 06 Oct 2023 Eastern Daylight Time