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 or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or related fields.
3 to 4+ years experience in data engineering or software development roles involving data pipelines, databases, and APIs.
Proficiency including experience with data processing and analysis pipelines (e.g. scrapy, pandas, nltk, langchain, transformers) and web frameworks (Rest APIs, Flask, etc).
Proficiency including experience with 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.
Background in research software engineering or academic/scientific computing environments.
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.

Senior Research Engineer (2-year contract), CDL, YPHSL