Computer Scientist / Data Analysis Engineer / General Techie (#HRP-CS)

What we do:

The Human Rights Data analysis Group (HRDAG) develops database software, data collection strategies, and statistical techniques to measure human rights
atrocities. This technology and analysis is used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations
around the world.

 

What you will do:

 *  Write computer programs for human rights data analysis projects. Process, clean, and transform data. Run data standardization and de-duplication.
    Write and run statistical analysis in R, including survey estimation, geospatial analysis, and general linear model fitting. Maintain and develop our
    data deduplication (entity resolution) framework written in python and Java. Write and run web crawlers and scrapers for data collection. Data
    archeology: recover data from ancient files in odd formats. We use free and open source software whenever possible, but we're pragmatic and work with
    what our human rights monitoring and advocacy partners need, so our environment is a pretty eclectic mix.
 *  Design and implement data visualizations, including everything from simple static charts and maps to custom interactive visualizations on the web.
    Familiarity with python, R, and JavaScript libraries for charting, mapping, and vis is helpful.
 *  Maintain and develop our team's automated data processing and analysis infrastructure (POSIX-environment command line tools built on bash, make,
    python, and R).
 *  Maintain and develop our team's internal groupware websites: a MoinMoin wiki, a rietveld code review deployment, and several small custom sites built
    on Django.
 *  Teach good programming practice and provide general programming and tech support (everything beyond basic IT stuff) to the rest of the team, who are
    experts in statistics and social science with varying degrees of techiness. Perform a little bit of GNU/Linux system administration.
 *  Write technical descriptions of HRP methods and projects at many levels of detail for academic publications, white papers, grant applications, grant
    reports, and internal documentation. Automate generation of publications based on data using LaTeX and Sweave. Give technical and non-technical
    presentations of HRP projects at conferences.
 *  Coordinate analysis and writing work with human rights monitoring and advocacy organizations, academic collaborators, and courts throughout the
    world.

You will work at Benetech's Palo Alto office; some domestic and international travel may be required.

 

Requirements:

 *  Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or closely related field with a programming focus, plus at least five
    years related experience post-Bachelor's. PhD a plus.
 *  High level of attention to detail, strong organizational skills, and ability to balance/manage multiple simultaneous tasks on your own.
 *  Skill areas: Small to medium scale programming, with an emphasis on readability and maintainability. Qualitative text mining & analysis. Distributed
    and parallel algorithms, machine learning, computer security & crypto, data visualization, web programming, and statistics.
 *  Demonstrated strong skill programming in Python and R.
 *  Demonstrated skill with Java, LaTeX, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript.
 *  Experience with or ability to quickly get up to speed with: bash scripting, make, SWeave, BibTex, Weka, svn, Django, and xml processing.
 *  Experience with unicode, unusual character encodings, and handling non-latin charater sets.
 *  If hired, ability to provide proof of eligibility to work in the United States.

Also helpful:

 *  Interest in and comfort with languages other than English, especially Spanish, French, Russian, or Arabic. Knowledge of or fluency in other languages
    is *not* necessary, but in your CV/resume, please note your level of skill (reading/writing/speaking) in any languages other than English.