Core Roles and Responsibilities:

• Support strategic planning, deployment, maintenance, and utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems and operationshttps://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/opinion/The-strategic-CIOs-first-day-In-search-of-IT-operational-excellence to meet public health informatics needs and facilitate decision making using data

• Support SPIM and other departments to define data repository requirements that support the decision-making needs of users at ZNPHI. This may include integrated data repositories for data within ZNPHI and for data shared by partners such as laboratory and vaccine coverage information, wastewater and serosurveillance data from MOH and other sectors.

• Gather and support data science and epidemiological requirements to ensure data availability for use in computational tools to compile and analyze data from  disease surveillance, pathogen genomic sequencing data, and population biology.

•  Support the identification of digital product needs for the institution and the governance and management of new products for the organization

• Support ZNPHI staff (e.g. surveillance officers and epidemiologists) to create data algorithms and analytics for identification/classification of key components the national disease intelligence matrices on key public health conditions under surveillance

• Consult with other scientists and researchers to analyze routine surveillance data, emergence response outputs and pathogen specific genomic information.

• Support the development and enforcement of best practices for public health informatics across the ZNPHI

• Recommend acquisition, installation and maintenance of ICT infrastructure in order to enhance accessibility of systems and required data sets by ZNPHI users

• Coordinate the development of the Public Health Security Information Management System (PHSIMS), an integrated one health disease surveillance platform, for use by PHEOC and strengthen disease surveillance and response

• Work with ICT to provide systems and performance feedback, conduct regular troubleshooting and maintenance procedures in order to ensure effective operation of systems and prevent loss of data and information

• Provide training on mentorship support to emerging junior informaticians and wider staff within the Institute
• Other duties may be assigned by the Supervisor.

Qualifications & Experience:

• Full Grade 12 School Certificate with minimum five O level credits including English and Mathematics
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, health information management, Computer information systems or related
• Master’s degree in computational science, informatics, biostatistics, mathematics or related field
• PhD in a relevant field is an added advantage
• Demonstrated experience in implementing data pipelines into data warehouses and data querying and analysis in the health sector
• Ability to build and optimize data pipelines and systems architecture
• Strong knowledge of SQL, Python, and other data engineering tools and languages.
• Strong understanding of data warehousing methods, database administration and hosting requirements

• Familiarity with data security and privacy standards
• Demonstrable outputs for analytics
• Demonstrable experience supporting data visualization
• Experience with data standards, integration, and transformation

Knowledge and Skills

• Strong analytical skills
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Team player with ability to work with multi-disciplinary teams
• Excellent interpersonal and public relation skills
• Capacity in decision-making and problem-solving
• Familiarity with public health operations