Data Manager for Language Technologies

Context And Mission

The Language Technologies (LT) Unit at BSC has a consolidated experience in several NLP areas, such as massive language model building, biomedical text mining, machine translation and unsupervised learning. It has been entrusted by the Spanish and the Catalan government with the mission to develop essential open-source resources and technologies for Spanish and Catalan. In connection with this, the LT Unit is currently in charge of two flagship projects at the national and regional levels: the Spanish National Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology, funded by the Spanish Secretariat of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, and the AINA project, aimed at developing AI resources for Catalan, funded by the Catalan Digitalisation Department. In addition, the Unit participates in various EU-funded international projects.

The Language Technologies Unit at BSC is seeking a Data Manager with experience in language technologies to lead the development of the largest curated Spanish language corpus. This corpus will be used to train reference foundational LLMs.

Key Duties
- Collaboration with MLOps and Deep Learning engineers: Work closely with machine learning engineers and the MLOps team to define and understand data requirements for projects. Assist in optimizing data flow and usage within machine learning pipelines
- Operationalization of data acquisition and into existing pipelines: Design and oversee the operationalization of accessing external data and its integration into the internal data processing pipelines. Ensure that the data integration process is efficient, scalable, and aligns with the research group’s technical infrastructure and goals.
- Data management and governance: Establish data management protocols to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data. This involves setting up data governance practices, including data quality control, metadata management, and access controls.
- Dissemination and engagement activities: Lead the dissemination of findings and datasets within the scientific community and beyond. This includes publishing data reports, contributing to academic papers, and presenting at conferences. Also, engage with the broader research community to foster collaborations and share best practices in data management.
- Technical documentation: Write comprehensive technical reports, project documentation, and scientific papers in English, Spanish, and Catalan. Ensure documentation is clear, accurate, and accessible to stakeholder.
- Research support: Assist in preparing research proposals, including the articulation of data needs and plans for data acquisition and management. Contribute to writing scientific papers and reports on findings.
- Continuous learning and skill development: Keep abreast of the latest developments in data engineering, language processing tools, and machine learning operations. Continuously update skills to improve data processes and workflows within the research group.
- Collaboration facilitation: Facilitate collaborations between the research group and external partners to enhance the group’s data capabilities. This may involve coordinating joint research projects, data-sharing agreements, and other forms of partnership.
- Monitoring and reporting: Regularly monitor the data landscape for new trends, sources, and tools that can benefit the research group. Provide reports and insights to the leadership on the status of data acquisitions, challenges faced, and the impact of data on research outcomes.
- Compliance and ethics oversight: Ensure all data management activities comply with relevant laws, ethical standards, and best practices in data handling. This includes overseeing the ethical review of data sources and uses, as well as managing any data protection implications.
- Training and support: Provide training and support to research team members on data-related topics, including best practices in data collection, management, and usage. Act as a resource for team members on data management tools and methodologies.

**Requirements**:

- Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Linguistics with a computational focus, or a related field. A Master’s degree or higher in these areas is highly desirable
- Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience

Demonstrable experience in managing large datasets, including acquisition, storage, processing, and dissemination of data. Experience in handling linguistic data is highly preferred.
- Excellent understanding of data administration and management functions (governance, transfer, storage, analysis, distribution, exploration, etc.).
- Understanding of data privacy laws, ethical considerations in data handling, and best practices in data governance.
- Hands-on experience with database management systems (e.g., SQL, NoSQL) and data integration tools.
- Proven experience in UNIX/LINUX environments, scripting languages and Python