Data Engineer

Job Description

Do you want to use your data engineering expertise to make the use of medicines safer? Do you thrive in multidisciplinary teams and enjoy solving problems of concrete value to the global pharmacovigilance community?

Then this position is right for you!

The pharmacovigilance product portfolio develops and maintains software-as-a-service solutions used by authorities, pharmaceutical companies, and other organizations in small and large countries worldwide to collect, collate and analyze reports of adverse drug reactions from across the globe.

The data collected (stored in our global ICSR database Vigibase) is also core in the areas of Research, Signal management and the VigiBase data services including Custom Searches. To improve the management of data and the technical support for data management activities we have identified the need for a new role focusing on databases, data pipelines and data management oriented services.

We are now looking for a skilled and creative data engineer to strengthen our skills and practices in these areas. The data engineer will have a unique opportunity to help UMC and its customers bring value out of our extensive data assets to both internal and external stakeholders, in a fun and dynamic multidisciplinary organisation.

The role will be part of Solution Engineering where the home base will be.
The majority of work will be performed in close collaboration with the Data Scientist and PV Scientist in Research as well as the Custom searches team and of course the rest of the Solution Engineering teams.

The Data Engineer has the following main responsibilities:

• Support data scientists with different degrees of data engineering competence in developing their data pipelines and deploying their proof-of-concepts products to Azure.
• Be responsible for the security and policy compliance of the data used by the data science team and its infrastructure.
• Help designing and optimizing database structure and application structure for speed and usability.
• Expert advice on cloud computing / Azure (e.g. how apps in Azure can access data on site).
• Ownership on how data is transferred from VIPS into DB06 for Research and custom searches purposes (instead of the current #1, which is less relevant for us as virtually all our apps access the databases directly).
• Set up a good data access structure for DB06 and individual databases on DB06 (currently we make all data scientists sysadmins once they are senior enough).
• Cost optimization for database / server use.
• Ensure data quality and fit-for-purpose.
• Be the interface between the Data Science team and the Products team, ensuring the data science team’s needs are met while ensuring harmonization of data infrastructures across the organization.
• Be the champion of good development practices in the team, fostering a culture of good CD/CI, DevOps and MLOps.
• Propose initiatives beneficial to the team in the area of automation and harmonization.
• Gather a deep understanding, via data analysis and visualizations, of our unique database of side effects of medicines, to advise on fit-for-purpose data infrastructures on Azure and lead their implementation.