Post Doc - AI Safety

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Career Programs

Post Doc – Data Analytics & Computational Sciences

Career Program

Beerse, Antwerp, Belgium, Leiden, Netherlands, Limerick, Ireland, Maidenhead, Berkshire, United Kingdom

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine is recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher, AI Safety to join our Data, Data Science & AI organization. This is a fixed-term research appointment of two years reporting directly to the Scientific Fellow, AI Safety.

The role can be based at one of our sites in Belgium, The Netherlands, UK or Ireland Agentic AI is becoming central to pharmaceutical R&D—from discovery and translational science to development and regulatory work—where evidence standards are rigorous and errors can ultimately affect patient safety and outcomes. Our GenAI Platform supports that shift across a rapidly expanding population of autonomous workflows.

Safety at this scale cannot be retrofitted through checks written into individual applications; it must be a property of how these systems are built.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow, You Will Lead a Focused, Publishable Research Program On How Agentic AI In Pharmaceutical R&D Can Be Governed Through Provable Controls, Continuously Tested Through Adversarial Assurance, And Made Safe By Construction. Your Research Agenda Will Sit Within One Or More Of The Team's Three Connected Mandates

• Provable controls. Develop deterministic, explainable controls that persist throughout agentic workflows, and methods to verify that they hold.
• Adversarial assurance. Advance continuous red-teaming and evaluation methods that test safeguards against credible failure scenarios and produce defensible evidence.
• Safety-native architecture. Investigate pre- and post-training safety alignment and defense-in-depth techniques that make agentic AI safe by construction for regulated pharmaceutical R&D.

• Not frontier model development. We are not pre-training foundation models  research question is how alignment and architecture should be adapted so that the models and platforms available to us are safe for pharmaceutical R&D.
• Not a guardrail-prompt role. Safety here is architectural and enforcement is deterministic. A system prompt asking a model to behave is not a control.
• Not research in isolation. Your research questions come from real agentic workflows, and success includes evidence that the methods work on them—not only a publication.
• Not a production engineering or operations role. You prototype and validate; platform teams own production deployment, on-call support, and long-term maintenance.

PhD in computer science, AI/ML, applied mathematics, or a closely related technical field,
preferably completed before the start date
.

• A record of first-author research, evidenced by peer-reviewed publications or preprints, in AI safety/alignment, AI/ML for…