FIXED-TERM FULL-TIME JOB VACANCY

SOLUTIONS TECHNOLOGIST

Digital Investigations Lab, Technology, Rights and Investigations Division

Multiple Office Locations Considered

Application Deadline: March 1, 2026

The Digital Investigations Lab within the Technology, Rights and Investigations division of Human Rights Watch (HRW) is seeking a motivated Solutions Technologist to join our innovative team and enhance our capacity for tech-enabled investigations. We believe that integrating technology responsibly through automating processes, bringing in new tools and developing workflows is key to pursuing crucial investigations that would not otherwise be feasible. The Digital Investigations Lab conducts rigorous human rights investigations, working in partnership with HRWs thematic and regional researchers.

The successful candidate will join a growing team of dedicated technologists. Specifically, this role involves engaging with researchers to understand their workflows and, in collaboration with the Research Technologist and Information Security and Technology department, designing tools that align with infrastructure, research needs and ensure technical solutions are secure, scalable and mission driven.

By helping us grow our tool base, write vital documentation, and mainstream technology to our researchers, you will not only help our day-to-day needs but also directly enable new and ambitious, cutting-edge work. We are seeking someone who is detail-oriented, guided by process and clear documentation, and motivated to build and maintain technology solutions that last.

This 12-month, fixed-term position reports to the head of Open-Source Research in the Digital Investigations Lab. This position will be based within commuting distance from one of the following HRW offices: London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, New York, Washington DC, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, or Stockholm, and must be willing to work from the office as needed.

Responsibilities:

1. Technology Integration and Growth: Implement and maintain new and existing tools and processes related to research, contribute to the growth of the overall technology tool base, write vital, clear documentation, and help mainstream technology to researchers across Human Rights Watch.

1. Support the acquisition and analysis of data for human rights investigations across various thematic and geographic areas, in line with the priorities set by Human Rights Watchs global strategy, and working with the Research Technologist. This acquisition of data could involve: scraping public information; creating machine readable data with approaches such as optical character recognition; finding hard to access data; finding company and website data; and other related processes. Alongside relevant colleagues, develop processes and guidance on the secure and ethical acquisition of data.

1. Work closely with HRWs Information Security and Technology department to ensure that agreed development processes are followed, information is securely managed and that any scripts, software, or new tools conform to HRWs in-house security and safety standards.

1. Automate ways of working, for instance building out technical solutions to automate day-to-day research processes within the Digital Investigations Lab. This could involve integrating open source tools within the teams existing workflows, software development, writing scripts to automate daily tasks, leveraging internal tools such as Power Automate and Power BI and exploring machine learning techniques.

1. Integrate findings and analysis into Human Rights Watch research by …