IT Specialist, Department of Medicine

IT Specialist, CITRIC Health Data Science Center

Entity: Aga Khan University

Location: Karachi, Pakistan

Introduction:

Aga Khan University, chartered in 1983 as Pakistan's first private international university, is committed to the provision of education, research and health care of international standard relevant to Pakistan and the region. The affiliated Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) has well-equipped investigative services and provides state-of-the-art clinical facilities. AKUH is the first hospital in Pakistan to be awarded the prestigious Joint Commission International Accreditation (JCIA) for practicing the highest internationally-recognized healthcare standards.

Established in December 2020 at Aga Khan University’s Medical College, the CITRIC Health Data Science Center is a dedicated hub for health data science. The Center is driving the transformation of health systems through disease burden estimation, clinical data curation and analysis, AI and health analytics, and public health initiatives. It functions as a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration among medical researchers, clinicians, data scientists, and policymakers; a capacity-building center, hosting workshops and training in health data science and disease modeling; and an innovation hub developing clinical data infrastructure, AI-driven analytics, and digital health tools to address regional health challenges.

As an equal opportunity employer, AKU believes in promoting a diverse and inclusive culture and is committed to adopt appropriate standards for safeguarding and promoting a respectful relationship with and between diverse workforce of its faculty, staff, trainees, volunteers, beneficiaries, wider communities, and other stakeholders with whom it works, including children and vulnerable adults and expects all employees/trainees and partners to share this commitment.

This is a grant-funded contractual position.
 

Responsibilities:

You will be responsible to:

• Designing, implementing, and maintaining clinical data warehouses, disease registries, and data pipelines, with a focus on ensuring data quality, accuracy, and integrity.
• Developing and monitoring scalable data pipelines to support smooth, automated data flows across systems, while optimizing for performance and cost-efficiency.
• Creating interactive dashboards and visualizations using Power BI or similar tools to support data-driven decision-making and research.
• Acquiring, cleaning, and preprocessing structured and unstructured health data for machine learning applications.
• Performing feature engineering, selecting and training appropriate machine learning models, and evaluating them using domain-relevant metrics.
• Integrating ML models into data pipelines, dashboards, or applications to enable real-time or batch decision-making.
• Continuously monitoring, validating, and updating models to maintain accuracy, fairness, and clinical relevance over time.
• Implementing validation checks and quality control measures to ensure data consistency and completeness.
• Managing and scaling cloud-based computing environments in coordination with the IT department.
• Applying best practices in data security, privacy, and regulatory compliance, ensuring the ethical use of health data.
• Facilitating communication and collaboration with clinicians, researchers, IT teams, and other stakeholders to align project goals and deliverables.
• Preparing and maintaining technical documentation and assisting in the preparation of periodic research and progress reports.
• Providing support for IT equipment at the Center and coordinating with central IT for servers and database support, as well as other research software needs.

Requirements:

You should have:

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field
• At least 3 years of relevant experience, preferably in healthcare.
• Demonstrated experience in managing and analyzing large healthcare datasets
• Strong working knowledge of SQL
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and/or R
• Working knowledge of business intelligence and data warehousing concepts, with proficiency in creating dashboards
• Experience in developing machine learning (ML) models and applying them in real-world settings
• Hands-on experience in designing and implementing data pipelines, scheduling data loads, and monitoring performance; experience with Apache Airflow is a plus
• Expertise in integrating large, diverse datasets, performing data quality checks, and creating insightful data visualizations
• Experience in designing data warehouse schemas and developing data models for reporting and analysis
• Working knowledge of application development tools, such as Flutter, is a plus
• A strong understanding of data integration, data quality assurance, and data governance best practices
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to convey insights clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

Comprehensive employment reference checks will be conducted.