Associate Data Analyst, Washington D.C.

About the Role: This is a contractor role. Candidates need to be located in the D.C. region, and have the ability to come onsite.

As an Associate Data Analyst, you will play a critical role in verifying and improving the quality of event data that fuels our predictive intelligence systems. You'll review event records extracted from global news sources—checking the accuracy of event classifications, actor identification, geographic tagging, and temporal coding against original source material.

This position is perfect for individuals who are:

• Highly detail-oriented with strong reading comprehension
• Knowledgeable about and interested in global current events and geopolitics
• Able to navigate and interpret news articles from diverse international sources
• Excited to apply their analytical skills to real-world defense applications and gain experience working with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
• Have prior experience serving in a data labeling role maintaining high accuracy under demanding timelines. 

Key Responsibilities

• Review event records against original news sources to verify accuracy of event type, actors involved, location, and date.
• Identify and flag coding errors, misattributions, or inconsistencies in event data.
• Apply sound judgment on ambiguous cases; document reasoning to maintain validation consistency.
• Proactively communicate with project leadership on progress, challenges, and workflow improvements, including quality assurance.
• Help refine validation standards and contribute to process improvements where possible.
• Develop deeper expertise in event data structures and gain familiarity with how validated datasets improve machine learning model performance.
• Maintain and uphold data security standards.

Qualifications

• An undergraduate degree, completed or in-progress.
• Strong knowledge of international affairs, geopolitics, or current events—regional expertise (South Asia, East Asia, Middle East, etc.) is a plus.
• Excellent English reading comprehension; additional language proficiency is highly valued.
• Strong command of Microsoft Suite and Google tools such as Excel, Word, Sheets, etc. and well-versed in file management—we want those who are highly organized.
• Detail oriented with experience reviewing data for errors or inconsistencies and making corrections to maintain quality and accuracy.
• Proven analytical and logical reasoning skills—able to manage multiple datasets and tasks with precision and consistency.
• Self-starter with a bias for action, stron