Associate, Data Science

Associate, Data Science CountryRwandaCityKigaliTypeFull TimeProgram (Division)Country Programs - RwandaTelecommuteNo Overview The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI) is a global health organization committed to our mission of saving lives and reducing the burden of disease in low-and middle-income countries. We work at the invitation of governments to support them and the private sector to create and sustain high-quality health systems. CHAI was founded in 2002 in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with the goal of dramatically reducing the price of life-saving drugs and increasing access to these medicines in the countries with the highest burden of the disease. Over the following two decades, CHAI has expanded its focus. Today, along with HIV, we work with our partners to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as COVID-19, malaria, tuberculosis, and hepatitis. Our work has also expanded into cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and other non-communicable diseases, and we work to accelerate the rollout of lifesaving vaccines, reduce maternal and child mortality, combat chronic malnutrition, and increase access to assistive technology. We are investing in horizontal approaches to strengthen health systems through programs in human resources for health, digital health, and health financing. With each new and innovative program, our strategy is grounded in maximizing sustainable impact at scale, ensuring that governments lead the solutions, that programs are designed to scale nationally, and learnings are shared globally. At CHAI, our people are our greatest asset, and none of this work would be possible without their talent, time, dedication, and passion for our mission and values. We are a highly diverse team of enthusiastic individuals across 40 countries with a broad range of skill sets and life experiences. CHAI is deeply grounded in the countries we work in, with the majority of our staff based in program countries. Learn more about our exciting work:http://www.clintonhealthaccess.org CHAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and is committed to providing an environment of fairness, and mutual respect where all applicants have access to equal employment opportunities. CHAI values diversity and inclusion and recognizes that our mission is best advanced by the leadership and contributions of people with diverse experience, backgrounds, and culture. Program Overview The Government of Rwanda (GoR) strives to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by enabling equitable access to quality health services for the population as outlined in the Fourth Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP IV). This commitment has been made against a backdrop of rising health care costs and uncertainty around the future availability of donor funding and calls for improved health sector sustainability. Acknowledging this, the Government aims to employ effective, equitable, efficient, and sustainable health care financing and systems strengthening, emphasizing primary health care as the cornerstone of a strong and sustainable health system. CHAI Rwanda’s Health System Strengthening (HSS) programs work on a day-to-day basis with Government leadership in the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB). The goal of those programs is to support the Government to accelerate progress towards UHC by ensuring the sustainable delivery of quality, essential health services.  This includes designing and implementing national Primary Health Care (PHC) reforms from health centre level down to community health, to increase health workforce availability, to prioritize and sustainably finance essential services. It also aims to support improved management, financing, and delivery of quality primary health care. Position Overview CHAI currently seeks an Associate, Data Science to work with the Ministry of Health (MOH), reporting directly to the head of data science at the National Health Intelligence Centre to help improve the quality, governance, and use of evidence on policy decision-making. S/He also reports in parallel to CHAI, HSS digital health program manager for specific CHAI supported initiatives. The Associate, Data Science is responsible for leading advanced data analytics, statistical modelling, and applied machine learning across priority public health and clinical domains. The role ensures that health data is transformed into high-quality, reliable, explainable, and decision-ready intelligence that informs AI development, policy decisions, and health system's performance improvement. This role serves as the technical bridge between raw health data, AI models, and real-world decision-making, ensuring scientific rigour, reproducibility, and national-scale usability. This is a top government priority for MOH, and the Associate, Data Scientist will therefore be seconded to the MOH/NHIC, S/He also reports in parallel to CHAI, HSS digital health program manager for specific CHAI-supported initiatives. Responsibilities Advanced Data Analytics and Statistical Modelling - Lead advanced descriptive, predictive, and inferential analyses across clinical, surveillance, and health systems datasets. - Develop and validate predictive models, risk stratification algorithms, forecasting models, epidemiological and operational analytics. - Apply rigorous statistical methods, hypothesis testing, and causal inference techniques to support decision-making. - Ensure all analytics are clinically interpretable, policy-relevant, and scientifically defensible. Feature Engineering & Machine Learning Support - Design robust feature engineering pipelines from EMRs, HMIS, LMIS and surveillance platforms. - Support AI Engineers with high-quality training datasets, feature selection, bias detection and data representativeness testing. - Contribute to development of machine learning models, particularly in tabular health data, time-series forecasting and population-level risk prediction. Data Quality, Governance, and Integrity - Lead implementation of data quality frameworks, completeness, consistency, accuracy, and timeliness checks. - Perform data audits, outlier detection, bias and missing data analysis. - Ensure compliance with national health data governance standards, privacy and ethical data use policies. - Maintain full data documentation, metadata standards, and lineage tracking. Health Systems Intelligence & Decision Support - Develop decision-support analytics and public health dashboards for disease burden tracking,resource allocation and service delivery optimization. - Translate analytical outputs into policy briefs, executive dashboards, technical report. - Ensure outputs are actionable, explainable, and aligned with the national health priorities. Data Engineering Support and Pipeline Optimization - Work closely with Data engineers, integration teams and AI engineers to ensure analytics assets are scalable, reproducible and production ready. - Support data pipeline optimization, ETL quality validation and real-time and batch processing readiness. Mentorship, Capacity Building & Collaboration - Mentor junior data scientists and analysts. - Lead internal analytics communities of practice, code reviews and methodology workshops. - Serve as a technical reviewer for analytics protocols, research designs and data science deliverables. Innovation and Continuous Improvement - Stay current with advances in Machine Learning, Statistical Science, Health Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Causal Inference trends. - Propose innovative analytics and data science use cases for public health, service delivery, health financing, supply chain and logistics for pharmaceuticals and disease surveillance. Qualifications - M.Sc. degree in relevant discipline (Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Actuarial Science, Operations Research, Statistics, Epidemiology, Health Informatics). - 5–8 years of professional experience in the field of advanced analytics and/or app