Research Associate – Technical Architecture & Data Engineering

About the role

Join the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as a Research Associate. You will design and implement scalable technical architectures, build high‑reliability data pipelines, and mentor team members on best‑practice engineering.

Key responsibilities

• Own and design end‑to‑end technical architecture and system blueprints for long‑term scalability and performance.
• Define engineering standards, enforce code quality, and establish robust development patterns across the stack.
• Evaluate and optimise backend frameworks (e.g., FastAPI) and frontend integration paths for speed and reliability.
• Architect, implement and optimise complex data manipulation pipelines, including heavy data extraction, validation, and file parsing/export (Excel, CSV, JSON).
• Manage concurrency, multi‑processing, worker queue distribution and cross‑process resource utilisation.
• Provide technical mentorship, conduct code reviews and champion system health.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to align technical capacity, infrastructure limits and architectural roadmaps.

Required profile

• Preferably a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electronics Engineering or equivalent.
• Independent, highly analytical, proactive and a strong team player.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Willingness to work flexible hours.

Required skills

• Python programming.
• FastAPI and other modern backend frameworks.
• Multiprocessing and concurrency management.
• Data‑engineer expertise with Excel, CSV and JSON file handling.
• Web‑frontend development: JavaScript, jQuery, DOM manipulation and UI responsiveness.
• Clean architecture principles and design patterns.