This is a hybrid position which requires 8 days/month in the office. You can be based in our office in Washington D.C., London, The Hague, New Delhi, or Mumbai. Existing work authorization is required at the time of application submission as WRI is unable to sponsor any visa work sponsorship for this position. To be eligible for this position in US, you must be a resident of DC, Maryland or Virginia at the start of employment.
About the Program:
The Data Lab is World Resources Instituteโs core data innovation and product delivery unit. We are a growing team of engineers, product managers and data scientists on a mission to use advances in data and technology to improve lives, protect nature, and ensure just transitions. We do this by (1) supporting technical innovation and quantitative research across WRIโs Programs and Country Offices and (2) designing, building, and maintaining digital products that turn data into action.
WRI seeks to use language technology to help our staff and users understand and act in a rapidly changing world. Examples of the impact we seek include accelerating research by automating time-consuming data cleaning tasks; shorting time-to-insight and improving experience through chat-based features on user-facing products; automating repetitive monitoring and reporting tasks.
Job Highlight:
Reporting to Global Director, Data Lab or their designee, you will integrate equity into your work. You will join the Data Labs and will be at the forefront using language technologyโincluding large language models (LLMs) and traditional natural language processing (NLP) approachesโto address urgent challenges for people, nature, and climate. You will identify and lead technical experiments and work with product, engineering, and subject matter experts across the Institute to turn successful experiments into useful tools and user-facing products. You will be based in the Data Labโs Data Science team and collaborate with other teams across the Lab, including the Data Labโs Product Studio and Product and Engineering teams. You will directly manage a small team of data scientists and external consultants.
What will you do:
Design, Implementing and Evaluating Language Technology Experiments (60%):
- Evaluate user needs and explore use cases for language technology across WRIโs research and product portfolios in collaboration with Data Labโs Product Studio
- Set the overall research and development strategy for language technology at WRI including LLMs and traditional NLP approaches in collaboration with the Data Labโs Global Director and/or their designee
- Identify and initiate a selection of experiments with internal partners from WRIโs Programs and Country Offices
- Evaluate the results of the experiments and iterate to improve promising outcomes and learn from unsuccessful outcomes
- Manage, mentor, and advise data scientists using language technology across the Data Lab, helping them solve technical challenges and build capacity
- Serve as the external face of WRIโs work on language technology, representing the organization at relevant sector and industry conferences
Advise on the Productization of Successful Experiments (30%):
- Communicate experimentation efforts to the Data Labโs Product and Engineering Teams and internal partners to help them understand the current state of the art and future trajectory for language technology
- Integrate feedback from Product teams into the design of experiments, solving issues identified via the productization process
- Analyze and recommend infrastructure design and strategic approaches for transitioning successful prototypes into scalable products, focusing on cost-effectiveness, environmental impact, privacy and security
Guide Responsible Use of Language Technology at WRI (10%):
- Complete quarterly updates to WRIโs Generative AI guidance for staff in collaboration with WRIโs Research Integrity team
- Contribute to scoping and strategy efforts with Data Labโs internal clients across Programs and Country Offices and external partners
What will you need:
- Education: You have a completed a bachelorโs degree in statistics, computer science, data science, or linguistics. Relevant work experience in lieu of degree is accepted
- Experience: You have a minimum of 10 years of full-time relevant experience including at least 3 as team leader, principal investigator or equivalent
- Experience in the following is preferred:
- Strong understanding of machine learning, NLP, and LLM fundamentals including transformers
- Ability to conceptualize and execute projects that leverage language technology to help users in the real world
- Experience conducting designing and developing small applications using a range of coding languages, APIs, and frameworks for language technology
- Experience using LLM-focused methods including prompt engineering, tool calling, retrieval augmented generation, and fine-tuning to improve existing models
- Experience developing and implementing evaluations for models and applications across a range of NLP and LLM tasks
- Sound judgement about data governance and ethics
- Understanding of the cost structures and implications of deploying language technologies at scale
- Ability to think holistically about data product pipelines from initial data collection to UX design
- Experience working across data science, product, and engineering teams
- Languages: Verbal and Written proficiency in English required and additional fluency on a language spoken in WRI Offices encouraged (e.g. Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese)
- Requirements: Existing work authorization is required where this position is based. WRI is unable to authorize visa work authorization
Potential Salary: US salary range is between 139,000 and 167,000 USD. UK: 65 โ 82 K GBP; NL: 80K โ 101K EUR. If located in another country office, salary will be determined by local market conditions.
Salary is commensurate with experience and other compensable factors.
How to Apply: Please submit a resume with a required cover letter by the date of 31 January 2025. We may close for applications sooner if we receive a high volume of qualified applications.
We are unable to consider your application without a cover letter.
You must apply through the WRI Careers portal to be considered.
What we offer: