Data Specialist

About the role

The Harris County Public Defender's Office seeks a full-time Data Specialist to help build and maintain the office's law enforcement accountability database through Techtivist. This data-focused position requires strong skills in data collection, organization, quality control, and analysis. The Data Specialist will work with complex records and bulk data related to law enforcement accountability, transforming large, inconsistent, and often fragmented sources of information into accurate, structured, and searchable data. This work supports attorneys, investigators, and policy staff in identifying officer credibility issues, patterns of misconduct, impeachment information, and other data that assists in client representation and broader efforts to improve the criminal legal system.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and update the office's Techtivist database.
• Collect, clean, structure, and validate data from public records, court records, civil lawsuits, agency rosters, disciplinary records, attorney submissions, case materials, and online sources.
• Work with spreadsheets, databases, PDFs, scanned records, and other structured and unstructured data sources.
• Extract and parse information from documents using OCR, PDF extraction, and other data-processing tools.
• Identify and resolve duplicate records, inconsistent officer names, missing identifiers, conflicting information, and other data-quality issues.
• Link records across datasets, including rosters, lawsuits, complaints, disciplinary records, Brady disclosures, and case-related information.
• Write or run scripts, when appropriate, to clean, transform, match, or import data into usable formats.
• Assist with database structure, data-entry protocols, source tracking, confidentiality designations, and quality-control workflows.
• Prepare, track, and organize public information requests for law enforcement rosters, command structures, policies, misconduct records, and related data.
• Query data and prepare reports, spreadsheets, summaries, visualizations, and other work products for attorneys and staff.
• Protect confidential, privileged, sealed, or otherwise sensitive information.
• Assist with user support, troubleshooting, documentation, and other Techtivist-related tasks.
• Perform other tasks as assigned.

Requirements

Applicants should submit a resume and cover letter describing their interest in the position. Applicants are also encouraged to submit a data project, code sample, dashboard, spreadsheet, research memo, writing sample, or other work product demonstrating relevant skills.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university in data science, computer science, statistics, information science, public policy, sociology, criminology, criminal justice, journalism, public administration, or a related field.
• At least two (2) years of experience working with databases, spreadsheets, public records, research data, or other structured datasets.

Skills

• Interest in using data to support public defense, law enforcement accountability, racial justice, or criminal legal system reform.
• Strong attention to detail and ability to work with large, complex, and inconsistent datasets.
• Ability to conduct factual research using public records, court records, online databases, and internal records.
• Ability to work carefully with confidential and sensitive information.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Preferences

Preference may be given to candidates with experience in:

• Python, R, SQL, Stata, Tableau, Power BI, or similar tools.
• Data normalization, records linkage, fuzzy matching, probabilistic matching, or deduplication.
• OCR, PDF extraction, web scraping, text parsing, or document automation.
• Relational databases, data schemas, database imports, or data integrity protocols.
• Creating reports, dashboards, data visualizations, or other tools for non-technical users.
• Public records, criminal defense, civil rights litigation, Brady/Giglio issues, law enforcement data, or court records.
• A public defender office, legal services organization, civil rights organization, policy organization, newsroom, academic research setting, or government accountability project.

Schedule

Monday - Friday | 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The anticipated start date is October 2026, subject to final fiscal year funding. A contingent offer may be extended prior to that date.

Pay

Depends on qualifications. Based on 26 pay periods.