Principal Scientist DDSAI AI/ML

At Johnson & Johnson, we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build a world where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured, where treatments are smarter and less invasive, and solutions are personal. Through our expertise in Innovative Medicine and MedTech, we are uniquely positioned to innovate across the full spectrum of healthcare solutions today to deliver the breakthroughs of tomorrow, and profoundly impact health for humanity. Learn more at jnj.com

As guided by Our Credo, Johnson & Johnson is responsible to our employees who work with us throughout the world.  We provide an inclusive work environment where each person is considered as an individual.  At Johnson & Johnson, we respect the diversity and dignity of our employees and recognize their merit.

Job Function:

Data Analytics & Computational Sciences

Job Sub Function:

Data Science

Job Category:

Scientific/Technology

All Job Posting Locations:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, Raritan, New Jersey, United States of America, Spring House, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Job Description:

About Innovative Medicine

Our expertise in Innovative Medicine is informed and inspired by patients, whose insights fuel our science-based advancements. Visionaries like you work on teams that save lives by developing the medicines of tomorrow.

Join us in developing treatments, finding cures, and pioneering the path from lab to life while championing patients every step of the way.

Learn more at https://www.jnj.com/innovative-medicine

This is a hybrid role available in multiple locations within Raritan, New Jersey; Spring House, Pennsylvania; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. While specific cities are listed in the Locations section for reference, please note that they are examples only and do not limit your application. We invite candidates from various locations to apply and encourage you to review the following states/cities where this opportunity is available:

 

Raritan, New Jersey

Spring House, Pennsylvania

Cambridge, Massachusetts

An internal pre-identified candidate for consideration has been identified. However, all applications will be considered.

We are searching for the best talent for the Principal Scientist position.

Purpose: Serves as an individual contributor who is a developing subject matter expert in the Data Science field. Develops actionable insights for methods and research for the internal Data Science community.  Applies in-depth skills of the field to design and develop industry-leading products. Contributes to scientific projects, programs, and processes of importance to the organization’s Data Science function.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and benchmark novel agent architectures, reasoning strategies, and tool-use patterns — determining how LLM-based agents can autonomously plan, hypothesize, and execute within scientific research workflows.
• Prototype agentic capabilities as proof-of-concepts across therapeutic areas (drug discovery, clinical development, translational science), rapidly iterating to identify which approaches deliver genuine scientific value versus incremental automation.
• Partner with therapeutic-area researchers to identify high-impact research problems where agentic AI can change what’s feasible — translating domain expertise into concrete agent designs and experimental tool integrations.
• Publish findings through peer-reviewed papers, demonstrations, and knowledge-sharing that advances J&J’s scientific position in agentic AI and attract top research talent.
• Establish the patterns and reference implementations that allow successful innovations to graduate from experimentation into the broader platform — defining what ‘ready for production’ looks like without owning ongoing operations.

Preferred (“nice-to-have”) qualifications:

• Familiarity with scientific data types, biomedical ontologies, or research workflows in drug discovery, clinical development, or translational science.
• Experience designing and running benchmarks or evaluation harnesses for AI agent performance in scientific domains.
• Track record of technical mentorship and cross-team scientific leadership — helping others adopt and extend novel AI capabilities.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, containerized deployment (e.g.,…