Jobs › Companies › Zifo › Senior Data Engineer

About this Senior Data Engineer role at Zifo

Zifo · Remote · United States

Design, build, and operate the data infrastructure for a clinical trial design platform that extracts insights from clinical protocols, regulatory documents, and published articles to accelerate trial design decisions. This role owns the pipelines that ingest, parse, transform, and serve clinical data - from raw PDF extraction through structured storage in Aurora and GraphDB, to serving curated knowledge for LangGraph-based agentic AI workflows.

Requirements

  • Build ingestion pipelines for clinical trial protocols, ICF documents, SmPCs, CSRs, and published articles (PubMed, CTIS, ClinicalTrials.gov) - handling PDF parsing, text extraction, and structured data normalization
  • Design and implement data models in Amazon Aurora (relational) and GraphDB (knowledge graph) to represent trial design entities: endpoints, eligibility criteria, study arms, interventions, therapeutic areas, and their relationships
  • Develop embedding and vectorization pipelines to prepare extracted clinical text for RAG-based retrieval in LangGraph agentic workflows - chunking strategies, metadata enrichment, and vector store population
  • Build and maintain ETL/ELT workflows that transform unstructured clinical content into queryable, linked data across both relational and graph stores
  • Implement data quality validation specific to clinical data - protocol section classification accuracy, entity extraction completeness, cross-reference integrity (NCT IDs, EudraCT numbers, MeSH terms)
  • Build data serving APIs (Python/FastAPI) that expose curated datasets to the Angular frontend and LangGraph agent layer
  • Set up data lineage tracking and audit trails to support regulatory traceability of AI-generated trial design recommendation

Required Skills

  • Strong Python development experience, including PDF/document parsing libraries such as PyMuPDF, pdfplumber, unstructured.io, or similar.
  • Advanced PostgreSQL-compatible SQL, including Amazon Aurora; experience with schema design, migrations, query optimization, and indexing strategies for large clinical datasets.
  • Hands-on experience with Neptune, Neo4j, or similar graph databases; proficiency in SPARQL or Cypher; experience with ontology and knowledge graph modeling for biomedical entities.
  • Experience with AWS services including Aurora PostgreSQL, S3, Lambda, Step Functions, SQS/SNS, and IAM, particularly for data pipeline orchestration.
  • Experience with PDF text extraction, document section classification, and named entity recognition (NER) for clinical/biomedical text; familiarity with embedding models and vector stores such as OpenSearch, pgvector, or Pinecone.
  • Experience building data-serving APIs using FastAPI, including asynchronous programming patterns and backend integration.
  • Experience preparing data for LangChain/LangGraph applications and designing RAG pipelines, including chunking, retrieval, reranking, and prompt-data integration.
  • Experience with Airflow, Prefect, AWS Step Functions, Temporal, or similar workflow orchestration tools; ability to design multi-stage DAGs with dependency management, retry logic, monitoring, and error handling.
  • Experience with Terraform or AWS CDK, Docker, and Git, including automated pipeline testing and deployment on AWS.

Domain Knowledge

  • Understanding of clinical trial structure: protocol sections (objectives, endpoints, eligibility criteria, study design, statistical considerations)
  • Familiarity with clinical data standards or terminologies (MeSH, MedDRA, SNOMED, ATC codes, CDISC) is a strong plus
  • Awareness of regulatory data integrity requirements (21 CFR Part 11, EU Annex 11, ALCOA+ principles)

Nice to Have

  • Experience with biomedical knowledge graphs (e.g., linking drugs -> targets -> diseases > trials)
  • Prior work with PubMed/MEDLINE data, ClinicalTrials.gov API, or EMA/CTIS data.
  • Apache Spark or Databricks for batch processing of large document corpora
  • dbt for transformation layer management over Aurora

Benefits

CURIOSITY DRIVEN, SCIENCE FOCUSED, EMPLOYEE BUILT. Our culture is unlike any other, one where we debate, challenge ourselves, and interact with all alike. We are a curious bunch, characterized by our passion to learn and spirit of teamwork. Zifo is a global R&D solutions provider focused on the industries of Pharma, Biotech, Manufacturing QC, Medical Devices, specialty chemicals and other research-based organizations. Our team’s knowledge of science and expertise in technology help Zifo better serve our customers around the globe, including 18 of the Top 20 Biopharma companies. 

We look for Science – Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical Technology, Biomedical Engineering, Microbiology etc. We possess scientific and technical knowledge and bear professional and personal goals.  While we have a “no doors” policy to promote free access within, we do have a tough door to walk in. We search with a two-point agenda – technical competency and cultural adaptability. 

We offer a competitive compensation package including accrued vacation, medical, dental, vision, 401k with company matching, life insurance, and flexible spending accounts.  

If you share these sentiments and are prepared for the atypical, then Zifo is your calling! 

Zifo is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our company.  We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. 

 

Ready to apply to Zifo?
Apply to Zifo

About Zifo

Zifo is a global scientific informatics service provider working across research, development, manufacturing and clinical domains. Our global presence of over 2000 employees is spread across our offices in US, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore & India.

We offer services in areas such as Scientific Informatics, Lab Informatics, Clinical Biometrics, Regulatory Compliance including Computer System Validation and Genome Informatics across 20+ countries. Our customers include 7 of the Top 10 global Bio-pharma companies.

We are listed as 'Technology Fast 50' by Deloitte for 9 consecutive years (2012-2020) and as one of the 'Best Places to Work' for the past five years.

See all jobs at Zifo →

Similar jobs

Eventual
Research Engineer, Multimodal Data
Eventual
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Hybrid $150,000–$300,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 3h ago
HUD
Software Engineer, Data Quality
HUD
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Onsite
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 4h ago
Cognite - AI for Industry
Sr. Data Engineer - FP&A
Cognite - AI for Industry
⚡ Apply early USA (Phoenix) Onsite
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 4h ago
Asana
Software Engineer, Data Loading Infrastructure (LunaDb)
Asana
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Hybrid $171,000–$190,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 4h ago
Block
Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer - Intelligent Data, Signals & Systems
Block
⚡ Apply early Bay Area, CA, United States of... Onsite $276,800–$415,200
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 4h ago
ZO
Senior Software Engineer, Data
Zocdoc
⚡ Apply early New York, NY Onsite $174,000–$220,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 4h ago
DigitalOcean
Principal Engineer, Data Center Architect
DigitalOcean
⚡ Apply early Seattle Hybrid $184,000–$231,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 5h ago
DigitalOcean
Principal Engineer, Data Center Architect
DigitalOcean
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Onsite $184,000–$231,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 5h ago
ID.me
Senior Software Engineer – Platform & Data Infrastructure
ID.me
⚡ Apply early McLean, Virginia; Mountain Vie... Onsite $190,978–$214,052
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 5h ago

Sign up for suggestions tailored to the jobs you open and the searches you save.

More jobs at Zifo

See all jobs at Zifo →

Apply now
🤖

Whoa — hold up

JobsRadar was built for real people having a rough time in their job search — not for automated requests. You're clicking way too fast and you're now temporarily blocked.

Come back later. If you're genuinely job hunting, we've got your back — just act like a human.

Catch your next role the second it’s posted.

Create a free account and we’ll watch the boards for you — the instant a job matches your search, it lands in your inbox or Telegram. No digging, no refreshing.

Create free account

Free forever · takes 30 seconds · already have one?

Get an edge on your job hunt.

Join our Telegram channel for the stuff that helps you land the role — salary benchmarks, the weekly market pulse, and new-feature drops. No spam, just signal.

Join the channel — it's free