Senior Data Scientist, Language Technology

This is a remote eligible position. You can be based in United States, 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. 

About the Program:

The Data Lab is World Resources Institute’s 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 WRI’s 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 technology—including large language models (LLMs) and traditional natural language processing (NLP) approaches—to 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 Lab’s Data Science team and collaborate with other teams across the Lab, including the Data Lab’s 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 WRI’s research and product portfolios in collaboration with Data Lab’s 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 Lab’s Global Director and/or their designee
• Identify and initiate a selection of experiments with internal partners from WRI’s 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 WRI’s 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 Lab’s 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 WRI’s Generative AI guidance for staff in collaboration with WRI’s Research Integrity team
• Contribute to scoping and strategy