Research Engineer

Location: Remote; UTC+5.5 to UTC-6 preferred, but flexible for the right candidate

Job type: Full-time

Reports to: Director of Research

Availability: Immediately

Salary: Commensurate with qualifications and experience

Overview of the role

Meedan is seeking a Research Engineer to play a key role in our global engineering team.  We build Check, a web platform for collaborative media annotation and claim-checking used by some of the world’s leading fact-checking and media organizations, such as India Today, Rappler, BOOM, Africa Check, Agencia Lupa and others. This includes handling thousands of fact-check submissions every month in multiple languages from a variety of countries. The architecture is composed of microservices which talk to each other through their APIs. One of those APIs exposes machine learning features related to image and text analysis used by the Check product. These include text similarity, image similarity, and classification.

The research engineer will participate in building and maintaining these services, connecting research, implementation and product, and bringing their experience and knowledge to produce high-quality, production-level code contributions and enrich the team’s collective assets and expertise. Their problem-solving skills, attention to detail, ability to learn fast, sense of initiative and positive attitude will ensure a long and rewarding tenure in a similarly-minded group. The engineer will be supported by Meedan’s research team and the DevOps team.

As part of Meedan you will have the opportunity to help improve the global misinformation ecosystem for global and local audiences. This is an ideal position for someone wanting to grow with a dynamic and diverse technology organization focused on solving hard information distribution problems. We encourage diverse applicants from underrepresented communities.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and enhance existing services, implementing readable, automated-tested and documented code

• Participate in architectural planning, especially related to data model and frontend-backend communication, in close coordination with the team and Director of Engineering

• Develop and undertake state-of-the-art research tasks in computational social science, social data science, and machine learning in coordination with the Director of Research. Research may include: 

  • Surveying existing literature, tools, and techniques for supporting humans in mass social media, such as algorithms, modeling, and datasets for fact-checking, messaging platforms, and online communication.
  • Leading quantitative analysis of large social-media datasets, including WhatsApp 3PFC data, WhatsApp public groups, traditional media, open data and other similar datasets
  • Developing and prototyping innovative solutions to Meedan’s short and long term research and product goals using state of the art AI and deep learning technologies

• Writing, publication, and dissemination of results in articles, blog posts, and project reports aimed at both academic and non-academic audiences, including:

  • Represent Meedan at scientific and industry conferences
  • Contributing to product feature design based on research findings
  • Supporting open scholarship by sharing code, datasets, and findings with good documentation and providing ad-hoc support to queries and/or potential partners
  • Participating actively in the intellectual life of Meedan sharing findings and developing research questions with Meedan’s program, product, design, and software development teams

• Contribute to Research team’s domain expertise and knowledge in one or several of the following areas: generative AI, large-language models, natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal analysis, multilinguality, and information retrieval as well as social data science and computational social science

• Follow development practices, including ticketing workflows, coding and testing guidelines

• Communicate requirements to make you the most effective member of the team possible

Qualifications

Required

• Demonstrated experience delivering production-grade machine learning applications

• Experience building API-related web technologies: HTTP, REST, etc.

• More than 5 years experience building production software

• Experience with Python

• Solid experience with version control, preferably Git and GitHub

• Strong command of English language

• Strong communication skills, especially with remote, multicultural teams

Preferred

• Working knowledge of AWS services or other cloud environments

• Experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch

• Experience with automated testing

• Familiarity with Docker or other containerization technologies

• Ability to travel for 1-2 months per year for in-person team meetings

• Natural language processing (especially experience tuning and using large-language models)

• Computer vision experience and/or multimodal applications involving text and image data

• Experience with node.js and/or Ruby on Rails

About Meedan

Meedan is a global technology not-for-profit that builds software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information online and off. We have an affiliated for-profit, Meedan Labs, which works with our for-profit clients. We develop open-source tools for creating and sharing context on digital media through annotation, verification, archival, and translation. We work with technologists, newsrooms, fact-checkers, public health professionals, NGOs and academic institutions on award-winning projects from election monitoring to pandemic response to human rights documentation. This work supports our vision of a more equitable internet.

Our team members are distributed through multiple cities and time zones. Our team members are able to work flexibly and respond to challenges across a range of project areas. This includes the following:

• Flexible work from home

• Flexible schedule

• Support for home office

• Internal EDI training and regular EDI impact and policy reviews

• Code of Conduct

Benefits

At Meedan, we believe that the work we do is only as strong as the wellbeing of the people who make it happen. We’re committed to providing a broad range of employee benefits that uplift the engagement and growth of our people, and to truly embody awesome in our Meedan culture.

Professional Development and Social Support

All candidates around the world have the following resources available:

• Professional development support

• Mentorship program plus regular learning sessions/seminars

• Regular optional team social activities online and offline, including games, yoga, meditation and meals

• Generous travel support for in-person meetings and retreats with colleagues, where public health guidelines allow

• Paid subscription to meditation apps and other mental health resources

• Complimentary access to publications like New York Times and others

• Digital security training and support

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Statement

We actively recruit and encourage applications from individuals from historically underrepresented communities in technology and journalism to apply, including women, people of color and/or from underrepresented cultural communities, veterans, people with disabilities and those who identify as LGBTQ+.