Research Assistant (3-year contract), Centre for Digital Law

ResponsibilitiesGeneral Job ScopeAssist the project PI and Co-I in designing, developing, and maintaining the project's key outputs and deliverables, including the Singapore database, open-source code repositories, project website, documentation, and research papers.Assist in engagement with partners, government agencies, and wider academic community including at roundtables, conferences, and eventsAssist with supervising and delegating tasks to junior project team members including other Research Engineers and student assistantsPrincipal AccountabilitiesDesign and build scalable data pipelines for extracting, validating, and structuring information from Singapore legal documents (e.g. judgments, statutes, academic publications)Develop automated extraction systems using rule-based methods, text processing, and machine learning/NLP techniques for information retrieval and annotation from legal textsCreate and maintain database infrastructure including data schemas, quality validation systems, and version control for research datasetsBuild public-facing API and documentation to enable researchers and legal tech developers to access the databaseImplement data quality assurance processes including inter-annotator agreement checks, automated validation, and error correction workflowsCollaborate with legal researchers to translate domain requirements into technical specifications and data modelsDocument technical processes and decisions to support reproducibility, future maintenance, and open-source releaseResearch and writing for technical papers detailing the project methodology and findings.Supervising and delegating tasks to junior project team members including other Research Engineers and student assistantsSupporting the organization of and attending project-related eventsQualificationsBachelor's in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or related fields1-2+ years' experience in data engineering or software development roles involving data pipelines, databases, and APIsCore QualificationsProficiency with data processing and analysis pipelines (e.g. scrapy, pandas, nltk, langchain, transformers) and web frameworks (Rest APIs, Flask, etc)Familiarity with software engineering practices, tools, and workflows (e.g. Git, Agile, unit testing, code review)Knowledge of database design and maintenance methods and principles (e.g. SQL, GraphQL, normalization)Demonstrated ability to work independently and in a team to build complete systems from requirements gathering through deployment and documentationPreferred QualificationsFamiliarity with LLMs and other methods for data extraction or annotation tasksKnowledge of legal, policy, regulatory, or similar domainsKnowledge of web scraping, XML/HTML parsing, and working with semi-structured documentsContributions to open-source projects or public datasets