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

HYPERSCAL SOLUTIONS PTE. LTD.; Singapore; On-site; SGD 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology solutions company in Singapore is looking for a Data Engineer to assist in developing and maintaining data pipelines and extraction systems. The ideal candidate should have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and experience in data engineering or software development. Responsibilities include building scalable data pipelines and collaborating with legal researchers to translate requirements into technical specifications. This role offers competitive compensation and opportunities for professional development.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Professional development opportunities

Attractive benefits and welfare

Qualifications

• 1-2+ years' experience in data engineering or software development.
• Proficiency in data pipelines, databases, and APIs.
• Knowledge of legal document processing preferred.

Responsibilities

• Assist in designing and maintaining project's key outputs.
• Develop automated extraction systems using machine learning techniques.
• Collaborate with legal researchers to refine technical specifications.

Skills

Data processing and analysis pipelines

Web frameworks (Rest APIs, Flask)

Software engineering practices

Database design and maintenance

Independent and team work

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science or related fields

Tools

Scrapy

Pandas

NLP libraries

SQL

Job description

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

General Job Scope

• 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

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or related fields
• 1-2+ years' experience in data engineering or software development roles involving data pipelines, databases, and APIs

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