Solutions Technologist

Core responsibilities:

• Implement and maintain tools and processes for research, contribute to technology tool base growth, write documentation, and help mainstream technology to researchers
• Support acquisition and analysis of data for human rights investigations through scraping, OCR, and other methods, while developing secure and ethical data acquisition processes
• Automate research workflows by integrating open source tools, developing software, writing scripts, leveraging Power Automate and Power BI, and exploring machine learning techniques
• Collaborate with researchers to analyze data, write findings, and present information on GitHub or HRW website in accordance with organizational guidance

This role directly enables new and ambitious, cutting-edge human rights investigations by enhancing tech-enabled research capacity, automating processes, and developing secure, scalable tools that make crucial investigations feasible.

Required qualifications:

• Minimum 5 years of relevant work experience in software development, data-systems design or information technology, preferably with international human rights, journalism or related organizations
• Proficient in Python and modern JavaScript with experience developing applications, browser extensions, Jupyter notebooks, or other research-facing tools
• Proficient in extracting data from the internet (via APIs and scraping) and cleaning unstructured data for analysis
• Good foundation in collaborative software development practices including version control (Git), code review, tool deployment, testing, and documentation

HRW offers competitive compensation and employer-paid benefits. If based in the United States, the salary range for this role is USD 80,000 – 88,000. Salary ranges in other locations vary based on local market.

Human Rights Watch is an international human rights research and advocacy organization known for its in-depth investigations, timely reporting, innovative advocacy campaigns, and success in changing human rights-related policies and practices of governments and international institutions.