Informatics Architect (T191097)

Position Summary    Apply here

The Informatics Architect will be primarily responsible for leading biomedical informatics infrastructure development and integration projects in close collaboration with information technology (IT) teams within the UAB IT organization, especially Research Computing, and with the Informatics Institute software development and Enterprise Data Warehouse teams. These projects are planned, designed, and implemented in close coordination with key stakeholders, including Informatics Institute faculty, UAB researchers, data scientists, bioinformatics specialists, trainees, and others comprising the translational research community here at UAB. The position will report directly to the Chief Bioinformatics Officer of the Informatics Institute.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and implement modern data architecture and technologies that empower UAB translational researchers to make faster, data-driven knowledge discoveries and enable precision medicine in a multi-disciplinary, team-based scientific research and development (RD) setting
• Incorporate and leverage existing domain expertise (in one or more complementary areas, including, but not limited to bioinformatics, statistical genetics, and biomedical informatics) to further develop the U-BRITE ecosystem
• Assist with grant-writing activities for grants-in-preparation, and provide leadership, informatics expertise, and effort on funded grants
• Educate stakeholders on relevant design patterns, write proofs-of-concept to help development teams with detailed design and implementation, and evaluate new technologies to help researchers keep up with industry trends and select the right solution for their team and task at hand
• Help research teams understand and implement DevOps-related technologies like containers, public/private cloud, infrastructure-as-code, software configuration management, and continuous integration deployment (CI/CD) to better represent, automate, and secure their IT/IS infrastructure and research processes
• Performs other duties as assigned

Preferred Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Experience enabling interdisciplinary team science in a fast-paced academic research setting
• Experience handling the three Vs of big data, especially data management and wrangling for genomics and other data
•  Experience communicating and coordinating professionally with stakeholders at all levels of the UAB organization
• Excellent communication skills, both written and conversational, to understand requirements and define problems with users
• Outstanding project management skills using agile development methodology and tools
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and managing both projects and people while wearing primarily an engineering hat
• Familiarity with modern data architecture, design patterns, and open standards, including, but not limited to Data Commons, Science DMZ, FAIR, Modern Research Data Portal, Data Version Control
• Experience with container technology (especially Docker and Singularity), both concepts and application
• Experience with public cloud (e.g., Amazon AWS) and private cloud (especially OpenStack) technologies
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (especially Terraform) and software configuration management (especially Ansible)
• Experience with continuous integration deployment (CICD), especially on modern DevOps platforms like GitLab
• Familiarity with high-performance computing (HPC) concepts and job queuing systems (especially SLURM)
• Familiarity with modern Software Development and SDLC process and best practice

Annual Salary Range: $89,880 - $146,055

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Information Systems or a related field and eight (8) years of related experience required. Work experience may substitute for education requirement. 

About UAB: UAB is a leader in biomedical and health research, with research funding from the National Institutes of Health in excess of $325 million in 2020. UAB ranks 27th in NIH funding nationally, 12th among public universities, and has been named America's #1 Best Large Employer 2021 and #4 Best Employer for Diversity 2021 by Forbes. About Informatics Institute The Informatics Institute, established in 2015 within the UAB School of Medicine, comprises core and affiliated faculty and staff with expertise across the biomedical informatics spectrum. Informatics is a discipline that brings data together to synthesize new knowledge, which helps researchers and clinicians develop personalized medicine, improve the delivery of health care, and respond to health challenges facing the state and the nation. Informatics Institute faculty conduct research at the intersection of computer science, data science, biostatistics, applied mathematics, human biology, bioengineering, and medicine. We work to develop new approaches, techniques, tools, and models that aim to solve problems relevant to human health and disease, including biomedical discoveries, assisted diagnosis, development of treatments, and novel therapeutics.

What You Will Be Part Of: The Informatics Institute, in partnership with the Precision Medicine Institute, the UAB Center for Clinical and Translation Science, and the UAB Health System, is building and advancing an Enterprise Platform for the effective use of clinical and biological data in research. The overall strategic environment includes new and existing HIPAA-compliant, high-performance informatics tools to provide researchers with a means to better manage and analyze clinical and genomic data sets and implements a translational research commons to facilitate and enable interdisciplinary team science across geographical locations. This platform includes broad integration of data and infrastructure, including Enterprise Clinical and Research Data Warehouses, High-Performance Computing and Research Computing infrastructures, as well as tools specific to research data delivery and analysis, and provides the foundation for successful biomedical research and advancements across research domains. As part of this, we build tools to allow individual investigators to access data directly as well as to support our staff, who provide custom datasets to the research community. We also participate in large national projects, providing integration of electronic health record data, and tools supporting such collaborations.