"Research Data Technician"

Unit:

School of Public Health MBU

Department:

Biostatistics

The Department of Biostatistics is looking for a talented individual to build an LLM based information retrieval engine for various applications.

Job Duties:

• Build RAG Pipelines: Design and implement robust data pipelines to ingest, clean, chunk, and embed unstructured text data (PDFs, HTML, text) into a Vector Database.
• Develop Secure APIs: Build the backend infrastructure using Python (FastAPI or Flask) to serve AI inferences to internal web applications.
• Orchestrate LLM Logic: Use frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex to manage the interaction between user queries, the knowledge base, and the LLM.
• Optimize for Accuracy: Implement "Grounding" techniques to ensure model outputs are accurate, factual, and cited—critical requirements in a medical setting.
• Privacy & Compliance: Collaborate with our IT security team to ensure all AI deployments adhere to strict HIPAA and data privacy standards.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Strong Proficiency in Python: comfortable writing production-ready code, not just notebook scripts. Experience with Pandas/NumPy is required.
• Generative AI Experience: You understand the RAG architecture. You have likely built a project using OpenAI APIs, Hugging Face, or local LLMs (Llama 3, Mistral).
• API Development: Experience building RESTful APIs to connect data science models to front-end interfaces.
• Demonstrated experience and flexibility working in and fostering an environment of respect, professionalism, and civility with a population of faculty, staff, and students from various backgrounds and experiences, or a commitment to do so as a staff member of VCU.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Currently enrolled in or recently graduated from a Master’s or PhD program in Computer Science, Data Science, Bioinformatics, or a related field.
• Hands-on experience with Vector Databases (ChromaDB, Pinecone, Milvus, etc.).
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) for deploying applications.
• Interest in NLP (Natural Language Processing) specifically within the healthcare or biomedical domain.

Salary Range:

$16 / hr

Benefits:

All VCU employee types are eligible for a wide array of benefits to support you during your employment at VCU. Consult the benefits website for information on benefits eligibility according to employee type.

Hours per Week:

20

Flexible Work Arrangement:

Fully Remote

University Job Title:

Hourly Lab/Research Technician 1

Contact Information:

Contact Name: Jinze Liu, Ph.D.
Contact Email: liuj15@vcu.edu