Data Scientist - Provincial Health Data Centre

About the role

The University of Cape Town, through the HPI-UCT Digital Health Partnership, is seeking a Data Scientist (payclass 10, T1 contract for 2 years) to be seconded to the Provincial Health Data Centre (PHDC) and its digital health and routine health data research portfolio. The post sits within the Centre for Integrated Data and Epidemiological Research (CIDER) in the Faculty of Health Sciences and involves onboarding and training researchers who need access to the PHDC's Secure Data Environment, while helping build and strengthen the data infrastructure for high-quality health research.

Key responsibilities

• Support the onboarding of researchers to the PHDC Secure Data Environment and provide training and technical support to them.
• Develop, maintain and support data pipelines using Databricks or similar platforms.
• Develop and maintain web applications and associated data services.
• Apply secure coding, access control and data privacy principles when working with sensitive patient-level data.
• Support data integration, processing and transformation using Python, Apache Spark and SQL.
• Contribute to monitoring, audit logging and CI/CD processes.
• Work with technical teams, researchers and stakeholders on digital health research projects and help improve the PHDC's data infrastructure.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Development, Engineering or a related field.
• Minimum of 4 years' experience in data engineering, data architecture or a related field.
• Experience supporting data pipelines in Databricks or similar platforms, and developing or maintaining web applications.
• Advantageous: Honours degree, experience with health information systems and health data, experience with Stata, R or Scala, and research experience or a Master's degree.

Required skills

• Proficiency in Python, especially for data engineering, and Flask.
• Apache Spark fundamentals and SQL.
• Data security, privacy and access-control principles.
• CI/CD, monitoring and audit logging basics.
• Working knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
• Cloud platform experience.

The 2026 annual cost of employment is between R661,967 and R778,783. Applications are made through the UCT careers site with a letter of motivation, CV, copies of qualifications and ID, and three referees; the closing date is 10 November 2026.