Research Assistant (3-year contract), Centre for Digital Law
Assist 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 events
Assist with supervising and delegating tasks to junior project team members including other Research Engineers and student assistants
Principal Accountabilities
Design 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 texts
Create and maintain database infrastructure including data schemas, quality validation systems, and version control for research datasets
Build public-facing API and documentation to enable researchers and legal tech developers to access the database
Implement data quality assurance processes including inter-annotator agreement checks, automated validation, and error correction workflows
Collaborate with legal researchers to translate domain requirements into technical specifications and data models
Document technical processes and decisions to support reproducibility, future maintenance, and open-source release
Research 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 assistants
Supporting the organization of and attending project-related events
Qualifications
Core Qualifications
Proficiency 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 documentation
Preferred Qualifications
Familiarity with LLMs and other methods for data extraction or annotation tasks
Knowledge of legal, policy, regulatory, or similar domains
Knowledge of web scraping, XML/HTML parsing, and working with semi-structured documents
Contributions to open-source projects or public datasets
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