Data Scientist II, Natural Language Processing; NLP Specialist

Overview

The ACLU seeks applicants for the full-time position of Data Scientist II, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Specialist in the Analytics Division of the Technology Department of the ACLU’s National office in New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, or Washington, DC. This is a hybrid role with in-office requirements of two days per week or eight days per month.

The ACLU Technology Department covers Analytics and Product & Engineering. The department provides analytics, engineering, product management, and product design expertise to advance the ACLU mission and priorities. The team emphasizes privacy and security, ethical use of technology, accountability and transparency in algorithmic systems, and responsible deployment of technology to support advocacy and litigation.

The Analytics division includes analysts, data scientists, survey experts, social scientists, and analytics engineers that support evidence-based decision making and bring quantitative insights to the courtroom and the public. This position is part of a collective bargaining unit and is represented by ACLU Staff United (ASU).

• Reporting to the Data Science Manager — Algorithmic Justice Specialist and collaborating with the Dev Ops Engineering Team, Product Manager for Discovery, and Algorithmic Justice Fellow, evaluate and support high-priority, scoped projects using NLP to advance the ACLU’s mission.
• Evaluate proposed uses of generative AI and non-generative natural language AI systems; provide recommendations on when AI tooling is appropriate or ill-suited for tasks, and contribute to development and implementation of AI-based solutions when appropriate.
• Work with various teams to evaluate AI use cases for feasibility and alignment with ACLU values, privacy, security, transparency, bias, and environmental impact considerations.
• Provide recommendations to department and organizational leaders on AI tooling suitability for different tasks and use cases.
• Develop recommendations and architecture plans for intentional, carefully crafted NLP tooling; select generative or non-generative AI systems and establish guardrails and monitoring based on use case context.
• Contribute to the development and implementation of AI-based solutions; collaborate with departments to ensure design, deployment, and ongoing evaluation.
• Contribute to AI governance practices and standards in collaboration with colleagues across the organization.
• Develop context-specific, high-quality benchmarks for language modeling systems tailored for civil rights and public interest organizations.
• Apply NLP methods to policy or regulatory text data to support litigation and policy work; collaborate with academic and civil society researchers when relevant.
• Brief departmental leadership on AI research and developments; prepare materials for senior leaders’ speaking engagements on AI issues.
• Communicate to non-technical audiences about how large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) are designed and deployed and their civil rights implications.
• Implement tooling to estimate the environmental impact of deployed AI systems and stay informed about developments in generative AI research and development.

• Be committed to advancing the mission of the ACLU.
• Center and embed equity, inclusion, and belonging in their work, respecting and valuing multiple perspectives.
• Collaborate respectfully to resolve obstacles and conflicts.

• Substantial research or professional experience related to fairness, accountability, and transparency of AI systems, especially generative AI.
• Substantial expertise and training in natural language processing, including statistical analyses with text data, evaluating and implementing ML methods for text data, and understanding text representation techniques.
• Strong familiarity with language modeling and NLP concepts, including the differences between small language models (SLMs) and large language models (LLMs).
• Extensive experience coding in Python and working with open-source NLP libraries such as transformers and NLTK.
• Experience working with text data from legal, policy, and social science contexts…