Dev Lead for a Social Media Auditing Platform

The Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT) seeks an experienced software development lead for a challenging research and engineering project aimed at development of a unique software platform for researching social media AI algorithms by automated black-box social media auditing. The platform will allow scalable hosting of auditing bots, automated content annotation, and design and execution of auditing scenarios. 

The project will last a little less than 2 years and will be solved as an internal project of KInIT.

The project serves a noble purpose and will have a great positive societal impact on the European (at the very least) online media environment. Currently, media regulators have no real tool to quantitatively investigate whether big tech follows on their self-regulatory promises or adheres to relevant legislation on tackling recommender system biases, mitigating toxic content, or preventing misinformation spread. With the new methods and supporting software platform built, the public will receive a powerful watchdog tool, fully in line with European values. 

We are seeking an experienced and motivated development lead who will co-create and lead a software development team, composed primarily of software and machine learning engineers who will collaborate with researchers and specialists in AI and social media auditing. The candidate is expected to manage all aspects of the team management as well as to perform senior developer and solution architect tasks. The project has its scientific principal investigator (PI), who acts as a product owner of the project and will be the primary partner for the candidate. PI is one of KInIT’s senior researchers and is well experienced in the research area as well as in software development.

We will run the project on agile principles, however the exact methodology will be co-developed by the candidate and the team. The key characteristics of the project will be its floating scope (as opposed to the fixed time frame and budget), feature prioritization, and uncertainty management. In KInIT, we truly value the power of a retrospective.

Benefits of the position:

  • Experience leading a research-oriented development project in artificial intelligence, in a research organization.
  • Learn about social media recommender systems, biases, and methods of their measurement.
  • Meet the Slovak and European elites in AI, disinformation tackling and regulation (KInIT is very well internationally connected with a lot of European projects).
  • Work with a very friendly team.

Your responsibilities will include:

  • Managing of a software development project of the social media auditing infrastructure
  • Leading the project team
  • Co-Designing the solution (including selection of technologies the solution will be built with) and contributing to the development tasks
  • Liaising with the project’s principal investigator (scientific lead) on the backlog and scope of the project
  • Mastering of the problem domain (social media auditing, AI-based agents, AI-based media content annotation)

Profile (requirements)

  • Substantial experience in leading people 
  • Substantial experience in senior software development / solution architect role
  • Experience with the expected technical & DevOps stack (Python and Python-based frameworks, Docker)
  • A proactive approach to continuous learning and staying abreast of the latest advancements in the field

Other conditions:

  • Salary from 3 500 Eur
Maria_Bielikova

“Help secure the social media algorithm fairness and let’s build a social media algorithm oversight! There aren’t many opportunities to lead projects like this.”

Maria Bielikova

CEO

Information about selection process
Should you be interested in applying for our job opening, please send us your CV. We will contact you with information about the selection process.

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