Join us for two years to build a unique social media oversight platform. Help secure the social media algorithm fairness.
Jakub Šimko
Lead and Researcher, Hiring manager
Join our
Sep 11. 2024
Research Software Engineer for a Social Media Auditing Project
The Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT) seeks an experienced software developer to work as research engineer on a challenging project called AI-Auditology. The goal of the project is to research new methods for automated black-box social media auditing. For this purpose, a unique software infrastructure has to be built, allowing scalable hosting of auditing bots, automated content annotation, and design and execution of auditing scenarios.
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 infrastructure built, the public will receive a powerful watchdog tool, fully in line with European values.
The candidate’s primary responsibility will be to contribute to the development of the auditing software infrastructure and work as part of a smaller team of engineers and AI researchers and specialists. Depending on previous experience, the candidate will participate in solution design, implementation and testing. The solution development will be led by a senior development lead, while the requirements will be defined by a sub-team of researchers, headed by project’s principal investigator (PI), who acts as a product owner of the software infrastructure. The 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. 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 a research-oriented software development project
- 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:
- Design, implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance of software
- Collaborate within a mixed team of developers, researchers and AI specialists
- Aid researchers with experiment design and execution, participate on experimental prototyping
- Master the problem domain (social media auditing, AI-based agents, AI-based media content annotation)
Profile (requirements)
- Substantial experience in software developer or solution architect role (5+ years)
- Experience with the expected technical & DevOps stack (Python and Python-based frameworks, Docker)
- Proficient in English
We are open to discuss junior position engagement in case your experience doesn’t match our requirements.
Other conditions:
- Salary from 2400€ gross, depending on the lever of seniority and experience of the candidate
- Contract type: full time
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.
By hitting “Apply”, you agree that we process your personal data for recruitment purposes, based on the legal basis of GDPR Art. 6 (1) letter (a) consent to the processing of personal data. You can withdraw your consent at any time. For more information please read our Privacy Policy.
