About this opportunity
We are looking to add an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help design and evolve our federated precision medicine platform, the Digital Health and Discovery Platform (DHDP). Reporting to the National Director, DHDP, this role will contribute to the architectural development of the platform with a specific focus on AI enablement and data security. This is a systems-level engineering position.
The Digital Health and Discovery Platform, a research initiative led by the Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI), is a federated AI and data-sharing software product for advancing disease research. The DHDP operates by bringing its software to where the data is located, analyzing it there, and delivering the results back to the platform and user.
This is a full-time, temporary position until September 2027.
About the Terry Fox Research Institute
The Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI), named for Canadian icon Terry Fox, is built on Terry's dream to end cancer through research. Established in 2007, TFRI is a registered charity and invests its funds in cutting-edge cancer research through highly collaborative, team-oriented programs and national research networks. Together with its many research and funding partners, TFRI empowers Canada’s brightest researchers to seek out new transformational and precision medicine discoveries to advance our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer with the goal of significantly improving outcomes for patients.
Key responsibilities
- Contribute to the evolution of our federated learning infrastructure, ensuring performance, privacy, interoperability, and regulatory alignment.
- Contribute to architectural design for distributed systems that support AI model training and deployment across institutional boundaries.
- Advance DHDP’s precision medicine strategy by building scalable, reliable platform capabilities that enable secure data collaboration.
- Work effectively with internal DHDP team members and external contractors to ensure alignment and clarity during the development of the project.
- Develop and integrate AI-enabled services and intelligent agents within secure healthcare workflows.
- Build extensible APIs and services that support research, analytics, and operational use cases.
- Champion responsible AI adoption and document repeatable context engineering and deployment practices.
- Appropriately steward Terry Fox’s legacy in all activities related to the DHDP project development
Our successful candidate
- University degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related STEM field with 5+ years of experience; or
- 8+ years of industry experience demonstrating equivalent technical leadership.
- Senior-level experience designing and delivering medium- to large-scale platform systems.
- Previous experience working with healthcare data and/or within a federated learning environment focusing on privacy is required.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems architecture and scalable backend development.
- Experience contributing to secure, multi-tenant, or regulated environments is an asset.
- Strong systems thinking with the ability to align technical architecture to long-term platform strategy.
- Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into production systems.
- Demonstrated ability to anticipate technical risks and design resilient, maintainable solutions.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to translate technical requirements to non-technical stakeholders
Benefits of working with us
- Flexible schedule
- Paid vacation
- Paid sick days
- Extended medical and dental coverage
- A work culture that values excellence, creativity, teamwork, learning, fairness and integrity
- A passionate group of high-performing teammates across Canada
Pay: $115,000.00-$135,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Company events
- Extended health care
- Flexible schedule
- Paid time off
- Vision care
- Work from home
Application question(s):
- Please describe your experience working with health data or on a biotech platform.
- Please describe your experience working in start ups.
Work Location: Remote
