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 with Bachelor's in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or related fields.
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.

OTHER INFORMATION

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Please note that your application will be sent to and reviewed by the direct employer - Singapore Management University

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