Co-Op Student - Data Engineer, AI Readiness (Medical-Legal Data)

Description

Position at Canadian Medical Protective Association

• CO-OP STUDENT - DATA ENGINEER, AI READINESS (MEDICAL-LEGAL DATA)

(Fully Remote- Ontario or Quebec)

CONTRIBUTING TO THE CMPA

The Student,Data Engineer, AI Readiness will helptransform raw, largely unstructured medical-legal records into governed, high-quality data assets that can be used safely and reliably for AI development and evaluation. This is not a one-time data-cleanup role: the student will help establish reusable data foundations that support CMPA’s broader AI roadmap.This placement offers a rare opportunity to see how disciplined data engineering-including data quality, traceability, privacy protection, and documentation-affects the reliability and auditability of AI systems in a regulated, high-stakes environment.

POSITION OVERVIEW

CMPA's AI & Advanced Analytics team builds AI solutions that process sensitive medical-legal content. We are looking for a co-op student to focus on transforming raw medical-legal data into AI-ready datasets: cleaned, standardized, labeled, and governed so they can reliably train, fine-tune, and evaluate AI models. This role works entirely with internally hosted data and infrastructure (on-prem GPU servers) to maintain strict privacy and security for PHI/PII, and supports real production pipelines already in active development.

You will gain hands-on experience designing data pipelines and quality controls for sensitive, unstructured information; applying privacy and governance principles in practice; and contributing to AI capabilities that are being developed for real organizational use. You will work closely with experienced AI, data, privacy, and domain professionals.

POSITION ACTIVITIES

• Clean, normalize, and structure raw text from call transcripts, internal documents, and case files into standardized, machine-consumable formats.
• Help define and apply AI-readiness criteria for medical-legal datasets - completeness, consistency, labeling accuracy, lineage, and auditability - so data quality becomes measurable rather than assumed.
• Develop Python scripts and lightweight data pipelines for ingesting, de-identifying, chunking, formatting, and validating documents at scale, with traceability suitable for audit review.
• Create and maintain evaluation/test sets (e.g., scripted advisor-member conversation samples) to benchmark transcription, summarization, and classification performance.
• Document data preparation standards, labeling guidelines, and known data quality issues so the process is repeatable, governed, and auditable across teams.
• Work closely with the AI program lead to align data preparation work with governance, privacy, and security requirements for regulated healthcare data.
• Support document classification and medical-legal coding workflows by preparing labeled datasets and validating tagging accuracy against existing coding schemes.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• Currently enrolled in a co-op program in Computer Science, Data Science, Health Informatics, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Foundational Python programming skills, including experience working with structured or unstructured data. Experience with libraries such as pandas, regular expressions, spaCy, or similar is an asset.
• Familiarity with core NLP or document-processing concepts-such as text normalization, tokenization, named-entity recognition, classification, or information extraction-through coursework, personal projects, research, or prior work.
• Ability to work methodically with ambiguous, incomplete, and messy real-world data.

SKILLS AND ABILITIES

• Strong attention to detail, sound judgment, and comfort handling sensitive or high-stakes information in accordance with established procedures.
• Ability to document data transformations, assumptions, validation steps, and known limitations clearly and consistently.
• Strong written communication and an ability to collaborate remotely with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Exposure to healthcare, legal, insurance, public-sector, or other regulated-domain data is an asset.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving data practices, including de-identification or anonymization of PHI/PII is an asset.
• Exposure to data quality, data lineage, metadata, data governance, audit, privacy, security, or compliance concepts is an asset.
• Experience with data annotation, labeling tools, building labeling workflows, or evaluating label quality is an asset.
• Exposure to speech-to-text, document OCR, document parsing, or text-extraction pipelines is an asset.
• Experience working in a Linux, Git, Jupyter, SQL, or API-based development environment is an asset.

POSTING DETAILS

• Job type: This is a Temporary Full-Time position from January 2027 to April 2027with possibility for a 4 month extension
• This position is for an existing vacancy
• Salary range: Between $22.00-$26.00/hour based on level of education and previous relevant work experience.
• Location: Fully Remote Job, working from a home-based office anywhere in the provinces of Ontario andQuébec.
• Students are defined as individuals who are enrolled in full-time studies at a post-secondary institution during the year that they are employed. To be considered for a position, candidates must be enrolled in an academic program from January 2027 to April 2027
• Skills assessment: Selected candidates may be required to complete a skill assessment
• Application deadline: October 9,2026at 4:00PM EST

The CMPA is an equal opportunity employer and is committedto being responsive to those living with disabilities and strives to prevent and remove barriers to accessibility. The CMPA will provide support and accommodation in its recruitment processes to applicants living with disabilities. If you are invited to participate in an interview and/or skills assessment and have accommodation needs, please let us know.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is a key priority, and we actively strive to build a culture of inclusion where employees can be their authentic selves and are valued for their diverse experiences and perspectives.

We welcome and encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds and a variety of lived experiences to apply.

The CMPA offices, located in Ottawa, are located on the unceded, unsurrenderedTerritory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation, whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial. We honourand pay our respect to these lands, and to all First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples throughout Turtle Island.