Technical Specialist Education

Would you like to contribute to the digital future of further education? As a technical specialist for education, you will work on an innovative platform that gives teachers and students easy access to interactive knowledge products, such as educational modules, knowledge clips and simulations. Are you a curious and analytical technical specialist who thrives on complex issues and has an eye for end users? Then we would like to meet you.

Where you will work

SURF is the ICT cooperative for Dutch educational and research institutions. Together with them, we work on digital services and complex innovation challenges to enhance the quality of education and research.

Working at SURF means working for a unique and open organisation. This is evident in everything: the structure of the organisation, the set-up of the project teams, the culture in our offices and the atmosphere among colleagues. SURF offers excellent terms of employment and takes a flexible approach to work/life balance. Employees enjoy working independently. In addition, everyone is given the space and freedom to use and develop their talents as effectively and broadly as possible.

The team you will join

You will be working in the Digital Educational Resources team. This team is responsible for an innovative and coherent service portfolio focused on knowledge circulation of practice-oriented research, digital learning materials and student products. Want to know more? Take a look here.

What you will do

As a technical product manager, you will work in a multidisciplinary team on the development and operationalisation of digital educational services that strengthen knowledge circulation in further education. You will be active within the Portals product group (Edusources, HBO Knowledge Base and Publinova) and, together with fellow product managers, you will be responsible for developing and delivering these services to educational institutions.

You will improve the client-facing functionality of our portals and actively seek generic, reusable solutions. With your expertise in modern front-end frameworks, you will translate the functional needs of students, lecturers and researchers into sustainable and future-proof solutions, which you will realise and manage together with developers. The portals are part of a broader architecture around the Content eXchange Platform (CXP), with a strong focus on open source, security and modern web standards.

Other tasks you will handle

• Technical management of services and development of improvement and new proposals.
• Design, development and improvement of front-end solutions within the service portfolio.
• Formulating architecture and technical requirements, including reusability and international examples.
• Providing professional guidance to software developers and management parties.
• Collaborating with product managers, scrum masters and domain architects, with a focus on open source, privacy and security.
• Setting up, implementing and improving service and supplier processes in accordance with ISO 27001.
• Exploring and initiating new technological developments and (open) standards, including alignment with national programmes such as Npuls.

Your skills and experience

You have a solid background in computer science or related disciplines and bring extensive experience in developing technical services within an innovative, often open source environment. You are enthusiastic about educational innovation, can manage software teams and combine independence with an eye for the higher goal: the end users.

In addition, you have

• HBO/WO working and thinking level with a relevant education (e.g. computer science, industrial design).
• At least 5 years of relevant work experience in software development or technical product management.
• Experience with (modular) web applications, data flows, APIs and container-based CI/CD environments (Kubernetes).
• An affinity with educational innovation and building new technical services.
• Experience in managing software developers and management parties.
• Knowledge of privacy, security by design and accessibility.
• Strong communication skills, persuasiveness and a results-oriented, independent work attitude.

SURF takes pleasure in doing its recruitment itself; acquisition is therefore not appreciated.