The Center for Health Statistics (CHS) within the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago is seeking a Research Software Engineer to support research computing needs, designing systems that link analytical methods with production environments, enabling scalable, reliable, and reproducible workflows for CHS research groups.
Requirements
- Proficiency in building and maintaining data engineering solutions, such as distributed processing, workflow orchestration, streaming or batch pipelines.
- Proficient with DevOps practices, including CI/CD, containerization, infrastructure automation, and deployment frameworks.
- Familiarity with machine-learning integration, including packaging models for production, reproducible workflows, and environment management.
- Strong programming skills in languages commonly used in research computing, including Python, SQL, and Bash.
- Design secure and compliant data systems in regulated research settings involving sensitive human subjects research data.
- Background developing data systems or research infrastructure in scientific, academic, or healthcare environments.
- Working knowledge of multidimensional item response theory and computerized adaptive testing algorithms.
Responsibilities
- Partners with investigators and analysts to design and build data pipelines that support large-scale statistical and machine-learning workflows with psychometric applications.
- Develops, automates, and maintains infrastructure for data ingestion, transformation, validation, and monitoring across multiple research studies with an emphasis on item-level data processing, calibration pipelines, and scoring services.
- Implements deployment strategies (CI/CD, containerization, orchestration) that ensure reproducibility, version control, and efficient delivery of computational tools used in adaptive testing and statistical measurement systems.
- Collaborates with research teams to integrate modeling outputs into operational systems, dashboards, or downstream applications.
- Maintains secure, compliant, and well-documented environments aligned with University guidelines and relevant data-use regulations related to human-subjects research data.
- Supports cloud computing resources, including performance optimization, resource provisioning, and cost monitoring.
- Establishes testing frameworks and code-quality practices for shared research software with rigorous validation of psychometric algorithms and adaptive-testing logic.
Other
- Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.
- Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 2-5 years of work experience in a related job discipline.
- Attention to detail, capable of producing reliable, traceable, and well-documented software artifacts.
- Organizational skills, adept at managing concurrent projects, meeting deadlines, and adapting to evolving scientific requirements.
- Collaboration skills to communicate effectively with investigators, data scientists, analysts, and administrative staff.
