Data Officer at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project

The project:

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a disaggregated data collection, analysis, and crisis mapping project. The ACLED team conducts analysis to describe, explore, and test conflict scenarios, and makes both data and analysis open for free use by the public. ACLED material is regularly used to inform journalism, academic research, and public discourse on conflict, and to support the work of practitioners and policymakers. ACLED is the highest quality and most widely used real-time data and analysis source on political violence and protest around the world.

The role:

ACLED is recruiting a Data Officer to contribute to ACLED data management. This is a full-time, remote position. The candidate must have the right to work in the United States of America, although the work is fully remote. Only those with the legal authorization to work in the US (citizenship, permanent residence, or work permit) can apply, even if they do not plan to be residing in the US. For more information, please review the Applicant FAQs.

The start date for the position is July 2021.

Position Title and Responsibilities

The Employee is required to perform the following duties and undertake the following responsibilities in a professional manner.

• Providing data management assistance to the Data Manager by cleaning ACLED data, preparing data submissions for upload to the API, uploading data to the API on a weekly basis, etc.
• Weekly review of data to spot anomalies in sourcing/coverage and advise and implement solutions together with the Data Manager
• Assisting regional desks with requested tasks, including creation of curated data files, automating large changes to ACLED data, performing quality control checks, etc.
• Assisting with conversion of local partner data to ACLED methodology
• Other ad hoc data management tasks

Skills and competencies

The following experience and abilities are mandatory:

• Fluency in English
• Reliable with strong problem-solving skills
• 1-2 years experience manipulating datasets (e.g. wrangling messy data, data cleaning, preparing data for analysis, etc.)
• Experience working with R software (intermediate) and Tableau (beginner)
• An extremely high level of attention to detail
• Ability to work remotely and meet deadlines with limited supervision
• Flexible team player, especially across a remote, global team

The following skills are necessary to succeed in the position:

• Research focus or professional experience in conflict research or peace-building
• Both familiarity and experience with: Excel (formulas), R (specifically the tidyverse package), Tableau (dashboards)
• Experience manipulating data, conducting statistical analysis, and drawing insights from large datasets

The following skills are preferred:

• Familiarity and experience working with ACLED data
• Undergraduate degree in conflict, political violence, or related field
• Knowledge of spatial analysis, GIS, GIS programs and geolocation software (e.g. ArcGIS, QGIS) and practices
• Experience visualizing/presenting data for stakeholders (especially using Tableau and Mapbox).