Postdoctoral Research Fellow Full-time NEW

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

The University of British Columbia invites applications for a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow to join a collaborative program between UBC, BC Cancer, and SOZO Intuition Systems, a Vancouver-based biotechnology AI company. The appointment is full time for 12 months, with the possibility of a one-year renewal subject to funding and performance. The fellow will be jointly supervised by Dr. John-Jose Nunez's research program in the UBC Department of Psychiatry and SOZO Intuition Systems. Approximately 80% of the fellow's time will be spent embedded with the SOZO team, building data pipelines and AI tools on SOZO's proprietary platform, with the remaining 20% spent with the Nunez Lab for Computational Mental Health & Cancer Care at UBC and BC Cancer (nunezlab.ca). Dr. Nunez's lab focuses on the application of artificial intelligence in mental health and cancer care, and the fellow will join a team composed of data scientists, software engineers, and medical trainees. This position is anticipated to be partly funded through a Mitacs Elevate grant.

Project Context

SOZO Intuition Systems is developing an AI-driven platform to integrate, curate, and analyze complex biological and clinical data relevant to the biotechnology sector. The postdoctoral fellow will play a central role in building data pipelines that bring disparate biological and clinical data types into SOZO's platform, developing analytical tools on SOZO's AI Workbench, and building an AI chat interface for SOZO users. This work intersects with the Nunez Lab's expertise in clinical NLP, generative AI, and retrieval-augmented generation applied to healthcare and life sciences.

Responsibilities

Reporting to Dr. John Jose Nunez, the incumbent will:

• Architect and maintain scalable pipelines for the ingestion and transformation of diverse biological and clinical data types, including drug targets, approved drugs, and related ontologies.
• Design components of the AI pipeline for enrichment and reasoning over technical life sciences data using large language models (LLMs).
• Manage the storage and retrieval of biological entities and relationships using vector databases and PostgreSQL.
• Integrate specialized NLP workflows to extract insights from unstructured academic and clinical text.
• Maintain rigorous scientific and data quality standards for AI-generated outputs, ensuring contributions meet clinical and technical standards.
• Help define data engineering practices, testing strategies, and quality standards; translate product requirements into scalable technical designs and implementation plans.
• Collaborate within multidisciplinary teams across SOZO Intuition Systems and UBC/BC Cancer, including technical, clinical, and scientific stakeholders.
• Supervise research assistants and trainees involved in data collection, analysis, and related projects.
• Develop and write manuscripts for peer-reviewed publications.
• Contribute to the development of future grant applications.
• Other activities as required.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• PhD completed within the last 5 years in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Biology, or a related field.
• Experience in data engineering, AI/ML systems development, or related applied research, with a track record of handling large-scale biological or clinical datasets.
• Strong proficiency in Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, vector databases (e.g., Pinecone), and NLP tools.
• Familiarity with clinical trial data structures, academic publication indexing, and biological ontologies.
• Experience operating data pipelines within AWS using Docker.
• Excellent communication, teamwork, and project management skills, with the ability to work effectively across technical and scientific teams.
• Eligible for Mitacs funding: must be a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, international student with a valid student visa, or international postdoctoral researcher with a valid work permit, aged 18 or older, whose PhD graduation date is less than five years prior to the project start date. Exceptions are available for extenuating circumstances such as parental leave. Applicants must not have been previously employed at the partner organization (SOZO Intuition Systems).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, including retrieval, reranking, and generation.
• Experience with agentic coding tools and frameworks.
• Record of peer-reviewed publications and effective collaboration across technical and scientific teams.
• Experience with oncology or other clinical datasets.

The expected salary for this position is $50,000 per annum. The Faculty of Medicine is committed to offering equitable and competitive salaries, commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate.

How to Apply

Applications, including CV, names of three referees, cover letter (1-2 pages) outlining specific examples of experience and research interests.

We invite applications from qualified candidates who share our commitment to employment equity and inclusive excellence, and we welcome applications from candidates belonging to historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized groups: Indigenous (First Nation, Métis, Inuit) Peoples, racialized persons, persons with disabilities, women, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and trans and non-binary people.

The University is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and equitable work environment for all members of its workforce. An inclusive work environment presumes an environment where differences are appreciated, recognized, and integrated into current structures, planning, and decision-making modes. Within this hiring process we are committed to creating an inclusive and equitable process for all candidates (including but not limited to people with disabilities). Confidential accommodations are available on request. If you have any questions regarding accommodations or accessibility during the recruitment and hiring process or for more information and support, please visit UBC's Centre for Workplace Accessibility website or contact the Centre.

With gratitude, we acknowledge that the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine and its distributed programs, which include four university academic campuses, are located on traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of First Nations Peoples and communities around the province.

Our Vision: To Transform Health for Everyone.

Ranked among the world's top medical schools with the fifth-largest MD enrollment in North America, the UBC Faculty of Medicine is a leader in both the science and the practice of medicine. Across British Columbia, more than 12,000 faculty and staff are training the next generation of doctors and health care professionals, making remarkable discoveries, and helping to create the pathways to better health for our communities at home and around the world.

UBC – One of the World's Leading Universities. As one of the world's leading universities, the University of British Columbia creates an exceptional learning environment that fosters global citizenship, advances a civil and sustainable society, and supports outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada and the world.

UBC hires on the basis of merit and is committed to employment equity. All qualified persons are encouraged to apply. Equity and diversity are essential to academic excellence. An open and diverse community fosters the inclusion of voices that have been underrepresented or discouraged. We encourage applications from members of groups that have been marginalized on any grounds enumerated under the B.C. Human Rights Code, including sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, racialization, disability, political belief, religion, marital or family status, age, and/or status as a First Nation, Metis, Inuit, or Indigenous person. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents of Canada will be given priority.