Principal Engineer, Asml

Additional Information

This is a term appointment currently expected to extend through 6/30/25, with potential for renewal subject to funding and departmental need.

We regret that Harvard Law School is unable to provide visa sponsorship for staff positions.

All offers to be made by HLS Human Resources.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of seven years' post-secondary education or relevant work experience

Position Description

The Berkman Klein Center (BKC) at Harvard University's Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) is a three-year, "pop-up" research initiative to accelerate progress on social media's most urgent problems, including misinformation, privacy breaches, harassment, and content governance. By convening participants across industry, government, civil society, and academia in timebound collaboration, the Institute aims to improve the state of digital social spaces through multi-model output.

The Applied Social Media Lab (ASML), established within RSM, is hiring practitioners from industry to develop products, tools, and protocols for existing and new social media platforms. Teams of technologists will work in thematic 'pods', generating and driving new ideas, projects, and experiments around themes like Trust and Safety Tooling, Political Deliberation, Disinformation Mitigation and more. The lab's output will range from white papers to fully-functional product prototypes.

A Principal Engineer will work with a small team of engineers to design, build, and test new kinds of social media technology. The technology may span the entire stack, from back-end storage to front-end user interfaces. In concert with a product manager and senior ASML staff, the Principal Engineer will ensure that the new technology satisfies traditional engineering goals like scalability and robustness while also meeting project-specific prosocial goals (e.g., giving users more control over their data, or strengthening a user's ability to defend against online harassment).

As a Principal Engineer, you will:

• Provide technical leadership and guidance to both your team members and your project peers.

• Help build and lead development of multiple discrete projects at once.

• Work with product management, lab director, and faculty to understand project needs and execute on shared vision.

• Collaborate with other ASML pods to identify technical areas of cross-pollination

• Engage with the larger RSM and BKC communities (e.g., by attending workshops and seminars) to stay abreast of current developments in the social media (and public-interest technology more generally)