Data Scientist II, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Specialist

About the Job

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 that has in-office requirements of two (2) days per week or eight (8) days per month.

The ACLU Technology Department is a broad umbrella covering both the ACLU’s Analytics and its Product & Engineering teams, two robust and innovative divisions that power the work of the ACLU. The department provides trusted, dependable, and impactful analytics, engineering, as well as product management and product design expertise for the ACLU. In partnership with experts across the ACLU, the Technology Team delivers best-in-class solutions, services, and innovation that advance the ACLU mission and organizational priorities. The tech team strives to ensure the ACLU leads by example in the ethical use of technology by ensuring privacy and security standards are maintained, directional insights are used to inform programming and business strategy, best-in-class products are designed to get the ACLU message out into the world and grow the ACLU supporter base, as well as to help steward high standards for algorithmic fairness, accountability, and transparency.

The Analytics division includes analysts, data scientists, survey experts, social scientists, and analytics engineers that support evidence-based decision making and bring quantitative insights on our issues to the courtroom and the public.

This position is part of a collective bargaining unit. It is represented by ACLU Staff United (ASU).

What You'll Do

Reporting to the Data Science Manager — Algorithmic Justice Specialist and collaborating closely with our DevOps Engineering Team, Product Manager for Discovery, and Algorithmic Justice Fellow, the Data Scientist II, NLP Specialist, will support development and evaluation work for high-priority, carefully scoped projects using NLP to support the ACLU’s mission. In this role, the NLP Specialist will be responsible for evaluating proposed uses of generative AI and non-generative natural language AI systems, providing recommendations on whether AI tooling is appropriate or ill-suited for various tasks, and when appropriate, contributing to the development and implementation of AI-based solutions to support the organization’s mission.

Your Day to Day

• Work with various teams and departments to evaluate proposed AI use cases for feasibility and alignment with ACLU values and requirements related to privacy, security, transparency, bias, and environmental impacts
• Provide recommendations to department and organizational leaders on whether AI tooling is appropriate or ill-suited for various tasks and use cases
• Develop recommendations and architecture plans for intentional, carefully crafted uses of NLP tooling, appropriately selecting generative or non-generative AI systems and related guardrails and monitoring based on the context and requirements of the use case
• Contribute to the development and implementation of AI-based solutions when appropriate, collaborating with various departments to ensure successful design, deployment, and continuous evaluation of such systems
• Contribute to the establishment of AI governance practices and standards in collaboration with colleagues across the organization
• Contribute to the development of context-specific, high-quality benchmarks for language modelling systems tailored for civil rights and public interest organizations
• Contribute to various other projects supporting the ACLU’s litigation and policy work by applying natural language processing methods to policy or regulatory text data
• When relevant, collaborate with academic and civil society researchers to turn your learnings and insights into resources to benefit other public interest organizations
• Brief departmental leadership on relevant AI research and developments and prepare materials for senior leaders’ speaking engagements on AI issues
• Communicate to non-technical audiences—including ACLU lawyers, policy advocates, and other staff—details of how large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) are designed and deployed, including their civil rights implications
• Implement tooling to estimate the environmental impact of deployed AI systems
• Stay abreast of important developments in the generative AI research and development space

Future ACLU'ers Will

• Be committed to advancing the mission of the ACLU
• Center and embed the principles of equity, inclusion and belonging in their work by demonstrating commitment to diversity with an approach that respects and values multiple perspectives
• Be committed to work collaboratively and respectfully toward resolving obstacles and conflicts

What You'll Bring

• Substantial research or professional experience on issues related to fairness, accountability, and transparency of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially generative AI systems
• Substantial expertise and training in the field of natural language processing, including experience conducting statistical analyses with text data, evaluating and implementing machine learning methods for text data, and strong understanding of text representation techniques
• Strong familiarity with language modeling and natural language techniques, including strong understanding of the core concept underlying the design of small language models (SLMs) and large language models (LLMs)
• Substantial experience writing code in Python and working with open-source NLP libraries such as transformers and NLTK
• Substantial experience working with text data from legal, policy, and social science contexts, such as legal filings, statutes, and regulations
• Familiarity with the core concepts underlying multi-modal (e.g., text-to-speech, text-to-video, etc.) generative AI systems and experience working with multi-modal datasets
• Familiarity with popular approaches and frameworks for monitoring and evaluating AI-enabled systems, especially generative AI systems
• Professional or research experience developing software and strong familiarity with common software engineering practices such as version control, testing, and code reviews
• Experience developing documentation of technical products and systems tailored to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working with cloud services (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Azure) a nice to have
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technologists without NLP expertise and non-technical stakeholders
• Excellent project management and collaboration skills, with a track record of partnering with cross-functional teams to translate organizational needs into technical solutions

Compensation

The ACLU is committed to equity, transparency, and clarity in pay. Consistent with our compensation philosophy, there is a set salary for each role based on geographic work location. The annual salary for this position is $142,694.00 (Level F), reflecting the salary of a position based in New York, NY. Salaries are subject to a regional pay adjustment if authorization is granted to work outside of the location listed in this posting.

For details on our pay structure, please visit: https://www.aclu.org/careers/ACLU_Geographic_Pay_Structure-July_2024.pdf

Why the ACLU

For over 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Whether it’s ending mass incarceration, achieving full equality for the LGBTQ+ community, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people.

We know that great people make a great organization. We value our people and know that what we offer is essential not just their work, but to their overall well-being.

At the ACLU, we offer a broad range of benefits, which include:

• Time away to focus on the things that matter with a generous paid time-off policy
• Focus on your well-being with comprehensive healthcare benefits (including medical, dental and vision coverage, parental leave, gender affirming care & fertility treatment)
• Plan for your retirement with 401k plan and employer match
• We support employee growth and development through annual professional development funds, internal professional development programs and workshops

Our Commitment to Accessibility, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

Accessibility, equity, diversity and inclusion are core values of the ACLU and central to our work to advance liberty, equality, and justice for all. For us diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion are not just check-the-box activities, but a chance for us to make long-term meaningful change. We are a community committed to learning and growth, humility and grace, transparency and accountability. We believe in a collective responsibility to create a culture of belonging for all people within our organization – one that respects and embraces difference; treats everyone equitably; and empowers our colleagues to do the best work possible. We are as committed to anti-oppression, anti-ableism, and anti-racism internally as we are externally. Because whether we’re in the courts or in the office, we believe ‘We the People’ means all of us.

With this commitment in mind, we strongly encourage applications from all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, citizenship, disability, veteran status and record of arrest or conviction, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

The ACLU is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If you are a qualified individual with a disability and need assistance applying online, please email benefits.hrdept@aclu.org. If you are selected for an interview, you will receive additional information regarding how to request an accommodation for the interview process.

The Department of Education has determined that employment in this position at the ACLU does not qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

Key skills/competency

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Data Scientist
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Machine Learning
• Python
• Generative AI
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Text Representation
• AI Governance
• Algorithmic Fairness