Data Officer

About the organization

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (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’s data management. Although the position is fully remote, preference will be given to candidates who are able to work in Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific time zones. For more information, please review the Applicant FAQs. The preliminary start date for the position is March or April 2024.

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 by cleaning ACLED data, preparing data submissions for upload, uploading data to the API on a weekly basis, etc.;
• Assisting regional desks with requested tasks, including creation of curated data files, automating large changes to ACLED data, performing quality control checks, etc.;
• Assist in building and maintaining ACLED’s internal suite of Shiny applications;
• Performing monthly checks on ACLED data, reviewing partner data for integration with ACLED data, and periodically reviewing data within ACLED’s internal databases;
• Other ad hoc data management tasks as necessary.

Skills and competencies

The following experience and abilities are mandatory:

• Fluency in English
• Reliable with strong problem-solving skills
• 1-2 years of academic or professional experience manipulating datasets (e.g. wrangling messy data, data cleaning, preparing data for analysis, etc.)
• Experience working with R software including Shiny (intermediate)
• 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
• Undergraduate degree

The following skills are necessary to succeed in the position:

• Familiarity and experience with: Excel (formulas & macros), R (specifically the tidyverse and dplyr packages), Shiny apps
• Experience manipulating data and drawing insights from large datasets

The following skills are preferred:

• Research focus or professional experience in conflict research or peacebuilding
• Familiarity and experience working with ACLED data
• Undergraduate degree in conflict, political violence, or related field
• Familiarity with GIS programs and practices, Tableau, Github, and/or SQL, particularly MySQL