Systems Engineer

We are seeking a Systems Engineer positioned at the intersection of health services research and data science.  Will be responsible for the design, standardization, performance, and management of data within the Department of Oncology. The ideal candidate is skilled in rigorous problem-solving with large-scale, real-world data.

A Systems Engineer for our Solid Tumors and Hematologic Malignancies Programs will be primarily responsible for developing and managing a comprehensive molecular and clinical database. This pivotal role involves the meticulous gathering, structuring, and integration of molecular and clinical data related to solid tumors and hematologic malignancies. The candidate will also ensure that this database seamlessly interfaces with detailed clinical information systems. Key responsibilities include designing robust data transfer pipelines from molecular pathology servers, ensuring data accuracy and integrity, and implementing innovative data storage solutions. The ideal candidate should possess strong technical skills in database management and be adept at working with large, complex datasets. Collaborating closely with IT specialists and clinical researchers, the Systems Engineer will play a crucial role in advancing our understanding of solid tumors and hematologic malignancies through data-driven insights.

Specific Duties & Responsibilities

• With a high level of autonomy, the Systems Engineer designs and deploys large-scale data frames to support analytics and evaluation for a wide range of research, operational, and evaluation projects supporting Solid Tumors and Hematologic Malignancies. This involves data management and integrating enterprise applications, research and other data sources in a collaborative multidisciplinary team.
• Database Design and Development.
• Establish robust data transfer and data storage solutions.
• Design and implement standard operating procedures that allow clinicians, organizational leaders, and scientists to analyze up-to-date molecular and clinical data from patients with solid tumors and hematologic malignancies.
• Write and maintain code to extract individual and organizational data derived from a multi-hospital electronic health record.
• Investigate data sources to understand all data generation and updating aspects, including data structures and sources, normal data values, and reasons for anomalies. Maintain documentation of data extraction processes to ensure standardization and retention of the core meaning of data.
• Understand requirements for data, information, reporting, and analytic needs to ensure alignment, maximize efficiency, and minimize duplicative effort with a number of overlapping projects and teams.
• Develop, manage, and ensure ongoing implementation of precision oncology data standards. Partner in the development, management, establishment, and enforcement of technical standards across multiple Precision Medicine programs.
• Collaborate with mentors and learners to design and support the implementation of projects.
• Identify areas for data quality improvement by participating in root cause analysis. Make recommendations to prevent and remediate data quality issues through the appropriate choice of architectures and practices.
• Assist with troubleshooting and tuning of diverse projects as needed.

Regulatory & Best Practice Compliance

• Deeply understand, educate other team members about, and ensure compliance with relevant human subjects and privacy regulations and best practices, emanating from both the federal level and Johns Hopkins, including the Institutional Review Board and Data Trust.
• Codify team knowledge and practices into Standard Operating Procedures that can be shared to ensure reproducible science both across Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine programs and throughout the world.
• Negotiate effective coordination with other teams within and external to Johns Hopkins Implementation & Maintenance.
• Write transparent code to implement data flows and locked data sets to support specific and ongoing analyses.
• Share code and support others sharing code in developing a fundamentally open and reproducible approach within the Cancer Center and across Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine.
• Monitor changes and resolve highly complex problems requiring high technical expertise by responding as problems arise. Accomplish this by reviewing all processing and output of the newly implemented solution and by proactively ensuring the solution works successfully to satisfy the team’s requirements and provide a smooth transition to the new solution.
• Recommend and advocate for data policies, governance structures, and control frameworks for the ongoing management of data to ensure interpretation stability, convergence, synchronization, accuracy, completeness, and reliability, both within the Cancer Center and across Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine programs.

Strategy / Leadership

• Embrace change, adapt to the unexpected, and focus energies, people, and solutions on practical and positive results.
• Demonstrate strong written and oral communication skills to effectively lead change, and communicate with business, research, and IT staff.
• Manage complex portfolio of multiple projects, with the ability to make explicit and collaborative prioritization decisions.
• Routinely interact with a multidisciplinary team including learners, early, mid-, and senior career-faculty, within and outside of Johns Hopkins.
• As the team grows, help in the recruitment and selection of new data analysts, develop on-boarding processes to nurture their growth and excellence, develop and implement a staged approach supervision, mentorship, and support.
• Collaborate with, and frequently lead, other technical experts, architects and subject matter experts to contribute technology elements with a focus on reliable data flows for evaluation and discovery.
• Track a broad range of emerging technologies in data flows and analysis.

Special Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities

• Strong analytical, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to multi-task & support multiple priorities and multiple deliverables.
• Strong understanding of data collection practices and data cleaning principles.
• Excellent understanding of human subjects and data privacy concerns for health or other deeply personal data.
• Ability to communicate effectively and work collaboratively with disparate clients from clinicians through social scientists to technical developers.
• Understand and implement standard IT concepts, development life cycles and best practices.
• Self-starter with the ability to appropriately prioritize and plan complex work for self or a team in a highly decentralized environment with minimal guidance.
• Demonstrated strong interest in developing new skills and methods.
• Ability to create quality assurance plans based on the analysis of design documents and requirements, create and execute test cases, log and assign defects and keep track of the defect status.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree.
• Five years related experience.
• Additional education may substitute for required experience and additional related experience may substitute for required education, to the extent permitted by the JHU equivalency formula.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience defining data architecture with special emphasis on interpretability, longitudinal analysis, and modularity.
• Experience with SQL and working in MS SQL Relational Databases.
• Experience with some modern statistical analytic environment.
• Data-bricks and cloud experience (Microsoft Azure preferred).

• Experience wrangling real, uncleaned data from health systems around clinical concepts.
• Doctoral or Master’s Degree in data science or related quantitative field.
• Knowledge of using HTTP APIs to retrieve data.
• Knowledge of data analysis languages such as R, STATA, and/or Python (specifically use of libraries such as Pandas to manipulate data).
• Experience with Java, C, HTML and CSS (optional)
• Experience with Docker (optional)

Classified Title: Systems Engineer
Role/Level/Range: ATP/04/PE
Starting Salary Range: Min $72,600 – Max $127,000 Annually ($99,800 targeted; Commensurate with experience)
Employee group: Full Time
Schedule: M-F, 830-500
Exempt Status: Exempt
Location: Hybrid/School of Medicine Campus
Department name: ​​​​​​​SOM Onc Bioinformatics
Personnel area: School of Medicine 

Total Rewards
The referenced salary range is based on Johns Hopkins University’s good faith belief at the time of posting. Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as geographic location, work experience, market conditions, education/training and skill level. Johns Hopkins offers a total rewards package that supports our employees’ health, life, career and retirement. More information can be found here: https://hr.jhu.edu/benefits-worklife/

Please refer to the job description above to see which forms of equivalency are permitted for this position. If permitted, equivalencies will follow these guidelines:
JHU Equivalency Formula: 30 undergraduate degree credits (semester hours) or 18 graduate degree credits may substitute for one year of experience. Additional related experience may substitute for required education on the same basis. For jobs where equivalency is permitted, up to two years of non-related college course work may be applied towards the total minimum education/experience required for the respective job.

**Applicants who do not meet the posted requirements but are completing their final academic semester/quarter will be considered eligible for employment and may be asked to provide additional information confirming their academic completion date.

The successful candidate(s) for this position will be subject to a pre-employment background check. Johns Hopkins is committed to hiring individuals with a justice-involved background, consistent with applicable policies and current practice. A prior criminal history does not automatically preclude candidates from employment at Johns Hopkins University. In accordance with applicable law, the university will review, on an individual basis, the date of a candidate’s conviction, the nature of the conviction and how the conviction relates to an essential job-related qualification or function.

The Johns Hopkins University values diversity, equity and inclusion and advances these through our key strategic framework, the JHU Roadmap on Diversity and Inclusion .

Accommodation Information

If you are interested in applying for employment with The Johns Hopkins University and require special assistance or accommodation during any part of the pre-employment process, please contact the Talent Acquisition Office at [email protected] . For TTY users, call via Maryland Relay or dial 711. For more information about workplace accommodations or accessibility at Johns Hopkins University, please visit accessibility.jhu.edu .

Johns Hopkins has mandated COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, as applicable. The COVID-19 vaccine does not apply to positions located in the State of Florida. Exceptions to the COVID and flu vaccine requirements may be provided to individuals for religious beliefs or medical reasons. Requests for an exception must be submitted to the JHU vaccination registry. For additional information, applicants for SOM positions should visit https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine/ and all other JHU applicants should visit https://covidinfo.jhu.edu/health-safety/covid-vaccination-information/ .

The following additional provisions may apply, depending on campus. Your recruiter will advise accordingly.

The pre-employment physical for positions in clinical areas, laboratories, working with research subjects, or involving community contact requires documentation of immune status against Rubella (German measles), Rubeola (Measles), Mumps, Varicella (chickenpox), Hepatitis B and documentation of having received the Tdap (Tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis) vaccination. This may include documentation of having two (2) MMR vaccines; two (2) Varicella vaccines; or antibody status to these diseases from laboratory testing. Blood tests for immunities to these diseases are ordinarily included in the pre-employment physical exam except for those employees who provide results of blood tests or immunization documentation from their own health care providers. Any vaccinations required for these diseases will be given at no cost in our Occupational Health office.

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