Research Tools Technical Lead

The Research Tools Technical Lead serves as the principal technical leader and application expert for tools overseen by the Research Tools team, including (but not limited to) UCSF's REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) research data management platform, while also providing enterprise-level IT architecture leadership across multiple technical initiatives. This role combines deep technical expertise in research informatics with strategic architecture capabilities, automation implementation, and technical project leadership.

This position operates at the intersection of research support, infrastructure automation, and technical innovation-serving as both the lead administrator for critical research data systems and a staff-level technical leader for cross-functional projects requiring advanced architectural guidance. This role will use AI/LLM driven technologies to accelerate development when possible and sensible, and may deploy or build new AI technologies as part of the growing Research IT footprint in this area.

Academic Research Services (ARS) serves the needs of the UCSF research community by providing an integrated repository of HIPAA compliant clinical and life sciences data and a centralized, secure, professionally managed infrastructure for the storage and management of research data. ARS empowers medical scientific investigations by offering secure computing environments, data capture, management and analysis tools, and support services that meet researcher's needs.

This position is part of the ARS Research Tools group, which has a history of successfully deploying technology to enable cutting-edge work by researchers across many domains by providing quality solutions that leverage our affinity for our customers alongside first-in-class design patterns and modern tooling. Our team members have opportunities to provide direct impact for real-world efforts across the basic sciences, socio-behavioral studies, epidemiology, and public and global health initiatives.

Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Technical leadership

Lead planning and implementation of highly complex technology projects that integrate Research IT systems with enterprise IT and departmental/project-specific research systems, potentially including electronic health records (EHR), clinical trial management systems (CTMS), biospecimen tracking, LIMS, and data warehouses. Projects may include building interconnections of existing systems to accommodate business use cases, as well as the creation or adoption of new systems to add new capabilities to Research IT overall. Serve as technical lead for complex, cross-functional projects requiring deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and coordination across multiple teams and leadership

• Provide staff-level engineering leadership including technical direction setting, architectural decision-making, code/design reviews, and technical mentorship to project teams
• Architect automation frameworks using industry-standard tools including (but not limited to) Rundeck (runbook automation), ServiceNow (ITSM integration), and policy engines, and other devops tooling (Github, SonarQube, etc) to streamline operational workflows and reduce manual processes
• Develop technical roadmaps that align REDCap and other research tooling capabilities with institutional research priorities, emerging technologies, regulatory requirements, and long-term strategic goals
• Evaluate and prototype emerging technologies (including AI) in research informatics, data capture methodologies, API integration patterns, containerization strategies, and cloud deployment models

• Establish architectural standards and technical patterns for research data systems including API design, authentication/authorization frameworks, data exchange protocols, and security architectures

REDCap operations

Serve as lead and driver for platform availability, data integrity, security compliance, and optimal performance of the UCSF REDCap instances across 24/7 research operations.

• Design, implement, and maintain REDCap infrastructure including server architecture, database optimization, module management, API integrations, and additional module deployment and risk analysis
• Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation for system configurations, standard operating procedures, troubleshooting guides, and best practices
• Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation for system configurations, standard operating procedures, troubleshooting guides, and best practices

• Provide specialized consulting services to research teams, departments, or external collaborators requiring advanced REDCap expertise, custom development, or complex data architecture

Site reliability engineering

Design and implement automation solutions for operational runbook automation including incident response procedures, change management workflows, provisioning tasks, and diagnostic automation. For example:

• Establish CI/CD pipelines for REDCap module deployments, configuration management, and infrastructure-as-code practices using tools such as GitHub Actions, Ansible, or similar platforms
• Build monitoring and alerting automation using tools like InfluxDB, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar platforms to proactively identify system issues and performance degradation
• Use APM or other application monitoring tools to tune php-fpm, nginx, and other web server tools to support stability and observability of a pseudo-clustered, monolithic application.
  

Our team is distributed across the United States, and strives to protect a workplace with a strong focus on work/life balance. We work hard to appreciate the diverse backgrounds and life experiences of each of our team members. Our team culture includes an understanding that there can be many pathways for all of our journeys; in support of this we encourage applications from folks with a rich and varied background, including those re-entering the workforce.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES

Required

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or a related/quantitative area, **OR** equivalent combination of experience / training.
• 4 or more years experience using modern devops tools for security scanning, CI/CD, and controlled code release practices
• 4 or more years experience managing code versioning and development workflows with a modern source control system such as Github; working knowledge of production system change control processes.
• Demonstrated experience owning and driving sophisticated technical projects in a complex organization or operating environment.
• Demonstrated knowledge of and at least 4 years of professional experience using modern data science and data engineering orientated high level programming languages, including SQL and at least one of Python, Julia, PHP, and/or Node.js.
• Demonstrated knowledge of REDCap application architecture, **OR** demonstrated knowledge of a highly analogous monolithic multi-tenant LAMP stack application requiring high availability and tightly defined compliance/security frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate with end users and diverse stakeholders in appropriately technical and non-technical terms
• Experience writing and executing application test plans or utilizing test-driven design practices.
• Experience managing documentation with Wikis, markdown, and/or document assemblers such as MkDocs.
• Demonstrated experience responding to highly visible security issues associated with an application
  

Preferred

• Advanced degree in health care information technology, computer science or a related/quantitative area, **OR** equivalent combination of experience / training.
• Post-graduate education in computer science, mathematics, or artificial intelligence, **OR** equivalent combination of experience / training.
• Demonstrated ability to interconnect existing open source or commercial software libraries using standardized API-driven processes
• Proven experience deploying tools or solutions leveraging foundational modern engineering tooling (for example, building or architecting a full-stack clustered/containered application or redeploying a monolithic application into a scalable architecture).
• Experience delivering platform-quality tools or experiences to a user community, preferably composed of researchers and/or developers.
• Working knowledge of microservice or service mesh technologies
• At least 4 years experience working with open source libraries as a contributor and/or community leader.
• Demonstrated ability to harden open source tools to be deployed in a secure environment, preferably one with specific compliance mandates
  

This position will sit on one of the areas in UCSF's Research IT apparatus responsible for evaluating, building, and deploying AI tools for the research community. As a result, there may be additional preferred knowledge, skills, or abilities, associated with AI technologies and engineering that will change rapidly over time.

This position will work to stabilize and fully operationalize a PHP based application which leverages php-fpm and requires substantial tuning; as a result, experience with php-fpm, APM (or other php-specific application monitoring), and monitoring tools (e.g. ELK, DataDog) is preferred.

Our team is distributed across the United States, and strives to protect a workplace with a strong focus on work/life balance. We work hard to appreciate the diverse backgrounds and life experiences of each of our team members. Our team culture includes an understanding that there can be many pathways for all of our journeys; in support of this we encourage applications from folks with a rich and varied background, including those re-entering the workforce.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES

Required

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or a related/quantitative area, **OR** equivalent combination of experience / training.
• 4 or more years experience using modern devops tools for security scanning, CI/CD, and controlled code release practices
• 4 or more years experience managing code versioning and development workflows with a modern source control system such as Github; working knowledge of production system change control processes.
• Demonstrated experience owning and driving sophisticated technical projects in a complex organization or operating environment.
• Demonstrated knowledge of and at least 4 years of professional experience using modern data science and data engineering orientated high level programming languages, including SQL and at least one of Python, Julia, PHP, and/or Node.js.
• Demonstrated knowledge of REDCap application architecture, **OR** demonstrated knowledge of a highly analogous monolithic multi-tenant LAMP stack application requiring high availability and tightly defined compliance/security frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate with end users and diverse stakeholders in appropriately technical and non-technical terms
• Experience writing and executing application test plans or utilizing test-driven design practices.
• Experience managing documentation with Wikis, markdown, and/or document assemblers such as MkDocs.
• Demonstrated experience responding to highly visible security issues associated with an application
  

Preferred

• Advanced degree in health care information technology, computer science or a related/quantitative area, **OR** equivalent combination of experience / training.
• Post-graduate education in computer science, mathematics, or artificial intelligence, **OR** equivalent combination of experience / training.
• Demonstrated ability to interconnect existing open source or commercial software libraries using standardized API-driven processes
• Proven experience deploying tools or solutions leveraging foundational modern engineering tooling (for example, building or architecting a full-stack clustered/containered application or redeploying a monolithic application into a scalable architecture).
• Experience delivering platform-quality tools or experiences to a user community, preferably composed of researchers and/or developers.
• Working knowledge of microservice or service mesh technologies
• At least 4 years experience working with open source libraries as a contributor and/or community leader.
• Demonstrated ability to harden open source tools to be deployed in a secure environment, preferably one with specific compliance mandates
  

This position will sit on one of the areas in UCSF's Research IT apparatus responsible for evaluating, building, and deploying AI tools for the research community. As a result, there may be additional preferred knowledge, skills, or abilities, associated with AI technologies and engineering that will change rapidly over time.

This position will work to stabilize and fully operationalize a PHP based application which leverages php-fpm and requires substantial tuning; as a result, experience with php-fpm, APM (or other php-specific application monitoring), and monitoring tools (e.g. ELK, DataDog) is preferred.