Sr Director​/Scientific Fellow, AI Safety, R&D Data Science and Digital Health

Scientific Fellow, AI Safety, R&D Data Science and Digital Health

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine (IM) is recruiting for a Scientific Fellow, AI Safety, R&D Data Science and Digital Health. This position can be located in New Brunswick, NJ;
Titusville, NJ;
Springhouse, PA;
La Jolla, CA;
Cambridge, MA;
Beerse, Belgium; or Zug, Switzerland. This position will require up to 25% travel.

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.

We are seeking a highly technical leader in AI safety for our Research & Development Data Science & Digital Health (DSDH) organization. Reporting directly to the Vice President of AI/ML & Digital Health, this role is responsible for embedding AI safety, robustness, and observability into the design, evaluation, and deployment of advanced AI systems across the DSDH portfolio and R&D use cases.

These systems span foundation and predictive AI models, generative AI, and autonomous agentic systems supporting discovery, development, clinical, and regulatory workflows.

This is a hands-on, technical, deeply scientific fellow role, focused on shaping model and AI system design and evaluation while contributing to policy, compliance, and enterprise governance. The Scientific Fellow will work closely with AI scientists, engineers, AI Quality & Optimization, Global Regulatory Affairs, Quantitative Scientists, and Johnson & Johnson Technology (JJT) to ensure AI systems deployed in R&D workflows are safe, trustworthy, and fit-for-purpose as AI capability and autonomy scale.

• Shape DSDH and IM R&D strategy for safe and trustworthy AI by defining multi-year research priorities, capability roadmaps, and investment recommendations for AI safety across discovery, development, clinical, and regulatory workflows.
• Represent AI safety as a senior scientific voice in function- and enterprise-level councils/working groups; set standards and priorities for safe scaling of GenAI and agentic systems, and provide technical leadership on safety principles and implementation for agentic and autonomous systems.

• Research, embed and implement AI safety-by-design principles into the development of foundation models, AI and generative AI applications, and agentic systems across R&D use cases.
• During all design phases, partner directly with AI and quantitative scientists across IM R&D, as well as with technical leads in JJT to:
  • Identify potential failure modes, risks, appropriate levels of autonomy and human oversight,
  • define safety-relevant observability signals, acceptable failure envelopes and mitigation strategies tailored to different R&D contexts (research, clinical, regulatory)
  • ensure monitoring captures unsafe behaviors, not only performance drift.
• Design and execute safety-focused models and evaluations, including but not limited to stress testing for hallucinations, edge cases, and failure propagation in multi-step reasoning and agent workflows.

• Provide technical leadership for AI safety in regulated environment, covering use cases, e.g. regulatory documentation for AI-enabled R&D processes and submissions, autonomous agents in GxP environments, etc..
• Influence internal policy and external best practices by contributing to guidance documents/points-to-consider for safe GenAI and agentic systems in pharma R&D, including participation in expert working groups and advisory panels.
• Track emerging risks, research, and best practices in AI safety and translate them into practical guidance for internal teams.

• Develop business cases to secure investment for AI safety capabilities and lead execution of funded initiatives

• Drive J&J innovation in the field, leading to high visibility publications in top-tier AI…