Research Assistant/Engineer (32-month contract), CDL, YPHSL in London

Company Description

Singapore Management University is a place where high-level professionalism blends together with a healthy informality. The 'family-like' atmosphere among the SMU community fosters a culture where employees work, plan, organise and play together - building a strong collegiality and morale within the university. Our commitment to attract and retain talent is ongoing. We offer attractive benefits and welfare, competitive compensation packages, and generous professional development opportunities - all to meet the work-life needs of our staff. No wonder, then, that SMU continues to be given numerous awards and recognition for its human resource excellence.

Responsibilities

• This position is for Centre for Digital Law, Yong Pung How School of Law (CDL, YPHSL).
• 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.
• 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.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or related fields.
• Minimum 2 years' experience in data engineering or software development roles involving data pipelines, databases and APIs.
• 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.
• 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.