Postdoctoral Research Fellow

University of British Columbia • Vancouver, BC

18h • Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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. 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.

Requirements

• 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).

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Benefits

• Benefits are included with the salary.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree