Research Assistant – Data Extraction & Lead Generation

Company: Meridian Commodities
Location: Fully Remote
Type: Part time

About us

Meridian Commodities is a global trading business dealing in textiles, sustainable packaging materials and plant extracts / essential oils across EMEA. We’re building a structured database of buyers, distributors, importers and market data to drive our international sales.

The role

You’ll find, extract, clean and organise data from public online sources: trade directories, B2B marketplaces, company websites, import/export databases and industry associations. The goal is accurate, usable datasets that our sales team can act on immediately. This is a hands-on execution role, not a theoretical research position.

What you’ll do

- Build and run scrapers or automation workflows to collect company and contact data from public sources
- Identify importers, distributors, wholesalers and buyers in target markets
- Clean, deduplicate, validate and standardise data (company names, countries, emails, phone numbers, websites)
- Verify contact accuracy, including email validation and checks that the business is active
- Maintain a structured master database in [Google Sheets / Excel / Airtable / CRM]
- Research market information on request: competitors, pricing indicators, trade flows, regulatory basics by country
- Document your sources and methods so the work can be repeated and audited
- Deliver against weekly targets (e.g., [X] verified leads per week)





Must-have skills

- Proven experience in web scraping and data extraction. Show us previous work.
- Python (BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium or Playwright), or solid command of no-code tools (Apify, Octoparse, PhantomBuster, Make/Zapier)
- Strong Excel / Google Sheets skills: lookups, pivots, deduplication, data cleaning
- Attention to detail. A dataset full of dead emails is worthless to us.
- Ability to work independently with clear output and minimal hand-holding
- Clear written English

Nice to have

- Experience with international trade data (importer databases, customs data, B2B platforms)
- Familiarity with email verification tools
- Knowledge of CRMs (Zoho)
- Additional languages: English

Compliance

You must only collect data from publicly available sources, respect website terms of service, and handle personal data in line with applicable data-protection laws (e.g., GDPR, UAE PDPL). We do not want data bought from shady list sellers or obtained by bypassing access restrictions.

How to apply

Send:

- Your CV or portfolio
- A sample of a dataset you’ve scraped and cleaned, or a link to code or a workflow you built
- A short answer: “How would you build a list of 200 verified baggase importers in UAE? Which sources and tools would you use?”
- Your expected rate and availability

Applications without item 2 or 3 won’t be considered.

Expected hours: 15.0 per week

Work Location: Remote

📌 Research Assistant (India)
🏢 Meridian Commodities
📍 India