Trainee (IRIS Platform)

Selection procedure reference: EMA/TR/10924 

Deadline for applications: 6 May 2025 23:59 CET 

 

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is a decentralised agency of the European Union (EU), located in Amsterdam. It began operating in 1995. It is responsible for the scientific evaluation, supervision and safety monitoring of medicines in the EU.

 

This traineeship opportunity is now open for applications until 6 May 2025 23:59 CET, with an intake on 1 October 2025.

About the traineeship programme

The Agency is looking for motivated, qualified recent graduates or students on an Erasmus+ or other programme or PhD students or Master's students (who posses a previous degree), who are interested in gaining experience and contribute to the Agency’s work for every patient in Europe. The purpose of a traineeship at the Agency is to perform tasks that are predominantly in the interest of the trainee’s training and principally serve to increase the trainee’s knowledge and to gain relevant experience.

Placement description

We are looking for a trainee in the Information Management Division.

Specific objectives and projects

The IRIS platform facilitates the exchange of regulatory and scientific information between EMA and organisations developing medicinal research products for potential use in the European Union. As the selected trainee, you will be able to work on one of the agency’s most important system, and in a dynamic and multicultural team, and agency. You will have an opportunity to participate in 2 potential projects related to IRIS platform: 

Project 1 - ALM Insights

Problem statement
Managing multiple low-code environments brings challenges in ensuring consistency, compliance, and performance. 
The EMA Procedure Management System (IRIS) struggles with limited visibility into configuration changes, manual compliance checks, and delayed issue detection. Additionally, Products Owners and technical stakeholder have not access to refined insights about the business activity within the platform.

Solution
A centralized solution to extract and analyze data across low-code environments to ensure consistency, compliance, and performance.
Track and collect configuration changes:
- What to collect: environment variables, Dataverse configuration, integrations, workflows, user roles and permissions, deployment configurations, etc).- 
- How to collect data: Use APIs provided by the Power Platform / Azure to extract configuration data. 
Configuration monitoring: 
- Monitor compliance with organizational policies and standards.
- As an example, implement mechanisms for drift detection, compliance checks, and performance monitoring.
Business activity monitoring: 
- Monitor relevant business events and track application usage, providing insights to Product Owners and team members for data-driven decision-making.
- As an example, monitor user volumes, number of submissions, number of cases and other business metrics.
Insights and reporting
- Build dashboards to visualize configuration health, compliance status and drift over time.
- Alerts: notify stakeholders of critical configuration issues.
- Trend Analysis: Identify patterns in configuration changes.
Remediation and automation:
Automated Fixes: Implement scripts or workflows to revert unauthorized changes or enforce compliance.
Approval Workflows: Require approvals for critical configuration changes.

Trainee Contribution: 
The ALM Insights project is an initiative lead by the IRIS System Team that started in Q1 2025 as part of the continues improvement activities.
The trainee would actively contribute to the development of the ALM Insights system by:
- Strategy definition: Participating in discussions to shape the overall approach and objectives of the project. 
- Backlog definition: Assisting in identifying and defining tasks, features, and priorities for the project backlog. 
- Increment implementation: Engaging in the development and implementation of project increments, gaining hands-on experience in solution design and execution. 
This role offers the trainee exposure to strategic planning, agile project management, and technical implementation within a real-world system initiative.

 

Specific objectives and projects (continuation)

Project 2 - IRIS Data Enhancements

 

Problem Statement 
The onboarding of new business processes onto the IRIS Platform increases the importance of data quality and knowledge to ensure smooth business operations. The EMA Procedure Management System (IRIS) requires additional support to maintain data quality standards across various domains, particularly product data, and to thoroughly document its journey through the platform.

Solution 
We need to deepen our understanding of data within the platform and establish data analysis capabilities to identify and explain data quality trends. This foundational step will enable us to pinpoint areas for improvement in systems integrated with the IRIS platform, improve how data is consumed at both platform and process levels, and develop self-service tools to accelerate issue resolution by our partners, including the Service Desk and business stakeholders.

Trainee Contribution 
The trainee will collaborate with the IRIS Core and System teams, primarily responsible for platform maintenance and data integration, contributing to one of the most critical areas on the platform. Specifically, the trainee will concentrate on the Product data domain (Medicinal Products, Packaged Products, etc.) and undertake the following tasks:

 

Product Data Catalog Definition:
- Document the meaning and unique characteristics of product data fields, based on product type and authorization type
- Track usage of product types and classifications across platform business processes
- Define minimum data requirements for various product types within specific business process scenarios

 

Data Quality Issues Identification:
- Identify recurrent data quality issues in the product domain
- Create queries to detect these issues and integrate them into automated monitoring solutions (ALM Insights)

 

Data Quality Issues Remediation:
- Assist in developing self-service tools to resolve common, pattern-based data issues (Python/Java-based)
- Support the identification of relevant stakeholders and track the progress of resolving specific bugs and user stories across various systems
- Engage in stakeholder management, gradually becoming a trusted source of knowledge on product data for queries and interactions.

Learning outcomes

The trainee will be able to work on one of the agency’s most important system, and in a dynamic and multicultural team, and agency. During the project the trainee can be involved in:

-    Learning about the management of IT projects in public and international organizations
-    Learning about different technical solution used by the Agency
-    Applying software engineering, development and coding principles. 
-    Understanding agile delivery based on SAFe framework.
-    Gathering and evaluating business requirements 
-    Manage the business stakeholders, work on effective communication and collaboration with non-technical personnel 
-    Creating architectural documentation. 

 

Technologies used: 

- MSFT Power Platform
- Azure (including DevOps)
- Azure Monitor / Application Insights
- Power BI
- NodeJS / JavaScript
- Python (FastAPI) / Java (Spring Boot)
- Rest APIs: Dataverse API, MSFT Graph, ALM Insights API 
- SQL
 

 

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible for consideration for this placement, you are required to:

1. enjoy full rights as a citizen of a European Union Member State or Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway;
2. possess a university degree in Computer Science,  Information Management, Mathematics, Statistics, Software Engineering or related studies. (minimum of three years or more) that must have been obtained between 6 May 2024 and 6 May 2025 or be a university student on an Erasmus + or a similar programme or a PhD student or a Master's student with a previous fully finished degree in the areas mentioned before.
3. a thorough knowledge of English (at least level C1) and good knowledge of other official EU language (at least B2) of the Common European Framework for Languages

For criteria 1 and 2, you will be required to provide proof in the application form and at the interview stage. Failing to present these documents may result in the disqualification from the procedure.

Additional skills

If the first degree is not in any of the above-mentioned fields, a postgraduate diploma, master’s or higher degree – or enrolment in such postgraduate studies – in any of these subjects.ts.

 

In addition, the ideal candidate will have:

- IT literacy, particularly in MS Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook)
- ability to work with Power Platform and MS components from that stack
- understanding Data Management concepts
- familiarity with concepts, principles and practices of information, document, electronic records and archives management.

 

The following will be considered an advantage:

- familiarity with an international environment
- familiarity with the mentioned technologies
- working knowledge of Microsoft Office suite, in particular Office 365, including SharePoint
- good writing skills and experience in preparing various types of communications, notes, presentations and emails.

 

Behavioural Competencies

You will demonstrate the following behavioural competencies:

• Communication skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Working with others
• Adaptability
• Research and analytical skills
• Learning and development

Expected selection timelines

Deadline for applications  6 May 2025 23:59 CET  Assessments (remote)  From end of June 2025 to mid-July 2025 Decision and offers  By end of July 2025 Placement start  1 October 2025

 

Conditions of traineeship

The traineeship is offered for 10 months (1 October 2025 – 31 July 2026) and takes place at the Agency’s premises in Amsterdam with possibility for teleworking up to 40% of working time from The Netherlands and occasional teleworking from outside The Netherlands. Traineeships are offered for either full-time or part-time (80% or 50%) if combined with university studies.

The Agency pays a monthly stipend of €1,942.19 for a full-time traineeship (reduced accordingly for 80% or 50%) and a travel contribution upon joining the Agency.

Each trainee will have a mentor at the Agency who will guide the trainee through the programme.

The conditions of employment are stated in the Executive Decision on rules governing the traineeship programme at the EMA available here.

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Domenico Scarlattilaan 6 - 1083 HS Amsterdam - The Netherlands

Telephone +31 (0)88 781 6000 - Email recruitment@ema.europa.eu

 

© European Medicines Agency, 2024. Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.