Postdoctoral Research Fellow in AI, Clinical NLP, and Data Engineering University of British Columbia in Canada

The University of British Columbia is inviting applications for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join a collaborative program involving UBC, BC Cancer, and SOZO Intuition Systems in Vancouver, Canada. This is a research-intensive postdoctoral opportunity in Computer Science, Data Science, Biology, Medical Science, and Biomedical Engineering, with a strong focus on AI/ML systems, clinical NLP, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and data engineering for biological and clinical datasets.

The fellow will be jointly supervised by Dr. John-Jose Nunez and will spend approximately 80% of the appointment embedded with the SOZO team building data pipelines and AI tools, and 20% with the Nunez Lab for Computational Mental Health & Cancer Care at UBC and BC Cancer. The project centers on integrating, curating, and analyzing complex biological and clinical data, developing analytical tools on an AI Workbench, and building an AI chat interface for users. The work intersects with clinical NLP, generative AI, ontology-aware data handling, vector databases, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, and healthcare/life sciences applications.

Applicants must have completed a PhD within the last five years in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Biology, or a related field. Strong programming and systems skills are required, including Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, LLMs, vector databases, NLP tools, AWS, and Docker. Experience with clinical trial data structures, academic publication indexing, biological ontologies, and large-scale biomedical datasets is expected. Preference will be given to candidates with RAG pipeline experience, agentic coding tools, publication records, cross-disciplinary collaboration experience, and oncology or other clinical datasets.

The appointment is full time for 12 months, with a possible one-year renewal depending on funding and performance. The expected salary is $55,000 per year at 1.0 FTE, and the post is partly funded through a Mitacs Elevate grant. The position is eligible only for candidates who meet Mitacs funding rules, including Canadian citizens, permanent residents, some international students, or international postdoctoral researchers with valid work authorization. Applicants must not have previously been employed by the partner organization, SOZO Intuition Systems.

To apply, submit your application through Workday with a CV, the names of three referees, and a 1-2 page cover letter describing your experience and research interests. The post emphasizes inclusive excellence and welcomes applications from historically marginalized groups.