Postdoctoral Fellow – AI‑Driven Data Engineering in Mental Health & Cancer

About the role

The University of British Columbia, in partnership with BC Cancer and SOZO Intuition Systems, seeks a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow to develop data pipelines and AI tools for mental health and cancer care research. The appointment is full‑time for 12 months, with a possible one‑year renewal.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and maintain scalable pipelines for ingesting and transforming diverse biological and clinical data.
• Design AI components that enrich and reason over life‑science data using large language models.
• Manage storage and retrieval of biological entities with vector databases and PostgreSQL.
• Integrate NLP workflows to extract insights from unstructured academic and clinical text.
• Ensure scientific and data‑quality standards for AI‑generated outputs.
• Define data‑engineering practices, testing strategies, and quality standards.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams across SOZO, UBC, and BC Cancer.
• Supervise research assistants and trainees, and contribute to manuscripts and grant applications.

Required profile

• PhD completed within the last 5 years in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Biology, or a related field.
• Experience handling large‑scale biological or clinical datasets and developing AI/ML systems.
• Strong communication, teamwork, and project‑management skills.
• Eligibility for Mitacs funding (Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or eligible visa holder).

Required skills

• Proficiency in Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL.
• Hands‑on experience with large language models, vector databases (e.g., Pinecone), and NLP tools.
• Familiarity with AWS and Docker for operating data pipelines.
• Knowledge of clinical trial data structures, academic publication indexing, and biological ontologies.

What we offer

• Salary of $55,000 CAD per year, full‑time (1.0 FTE) with benefits.
• Opportunity to work jointly with the Nunez Laboratory at UBC and the AI‑focused biotech company SOZO Intuition Systems.