Data Scientist III - Quality and Patient Safety initiatives

Job No: 538643

Work Type: Full Time

Location: Main Campus (Gainesville, FL)

Categories: Health Care Administration/Support

Department:  - MD-QUALITY & PATIENT SAFETY

The Data Scientist III will advance the Quality and Patient Safety initiative (QPSi) under the UF College of Medicine (COM) by harnessing clinical and operational data to improve patient safety and clinical care quality across the UF Health enterprise and beyond.

The Data Scientist will collaborate with interdisciplinary teams and numerous stakeholders to create and deploy innovative approaches to improve patient safety and healthcare operation pathways. The position might participate in clinically relevant feature extraction from raw data, designing and developing algorithms to model complex systems, providing data science expertise, developing reliable infrastructures for the secure rollout of AI models, meeting with end-users and key stakeholders to understand operational questions to be addressed, and working with other team members to support development of AI models and their impact in clinical settings.

• Collaborate with clinical teams to design data-driven decision-making models and translate decision points into available clinical data.
• Explore and evaluate scientific methodologies, such as reinforcement learning, net benefit models, state space models, causal inference, and generative AI considering uncertainty, constraints, and multiple competing objectives.
• Design and implement AI models, optimizing physical and time resources.
• Lead innovative approaches to integration of different data modalities into AI models to mitigate complex healthcare challenges.
• Contribute robust, clean, and maintainable code to standard AI and machine learning pipelines, ensuring reproducibility and efficient collaboration across the team.
• Leverage modern software engineering practices (version control, code reviews, unit testing) to maintain high-quality model development processes.
• Identify opportunities for advanced analytics and integration approaches.

• Develop scalable feature extraction pipelines to programmatically transform raw clinical data into model-ready inputs for various healthcare scenarios.
• Engineer automated data validation frameworks to handle missing data, schema enforcement, categorical encoding, and derived variables at scale.
• Architect and implement robust ETL workflows for data ingestion and transformation that enforce healthcare data governance and privacy standards.
• Implement feature stores or shared transformation libraries to ensure strict parity between training and inference environments and minimize training-serving skew.
• Conduct technical benchmarking and integration testing to evaluate new analytics tools and models within the production stack.

• Engineer production-grade CI/CD pipelines to automate model testing, deployment, monitoring, and retraining cycles in clinical environments.
• Architect and maintain containerized microservices (e.g., Docker) to serve model predictions via secure, low-latency APIs.
• Build comprehensive observability and logging infrastructure to track system health, latency, and model drift in real-time.
• Implement model versioning and rollback strategies to manage updates triggered by new data, clinical practice changes, or organizational needs.

• Create comprehensive reports and documentation summarizing the project status, summary recommendations, and final outcomes.
• Develop interactive dashboards and other reporting mechanisms that facilitate real-time analytics and model insights.
• Collaborate with teams and subject matter experts to prepare technical and non-technical presentations, analysis, and reports for leadership, program design reviews, and operational readiness reviews to share knowledge and promote partnership.

The University of Florida's College of Medicine is committed to advancing health through education, research, and patient care. With a focus on innovation and excellence, the college prepares future healthcare leaders through…