Principal AI Lead - Surgical AI

Overview

Johnson & Johnson Med Tech is focused on shaping the future of digital surgery and expanding its robotics and digital solutions offerings across the entire portfolio, with multi-specialty, end-to-end solutions in endoluminal intervention, general surgery and a comprehensive digital portfolio. This includes the Polyphonic® platform, a first-of-its-kind digital platform that advances patient empowerment, surgical performance, operating room (OR) collaboration and operational efficiency by synchronizing devices, data and AI driven insights in one place to simplify access, build confidence and unify a non-linear care experience.

• Conceptualize structured pipelines (ingestion to production), planning flows, agentic workflows
• Build capability primitives such as pre-built models, feature stores, AI-assisted annotations, proactive insights
• Develop modular and reusable intelligence components

• Select appropriate model families based on capability and cost constraints
• Lead the design and deployment of CNN-based, transformer-based and LLM/VLM-based models
• Apply prompting, constraints, and reasoning structures to reduce hallucination

• Integrate sophisticated models with product functionality and ensure output reliability, consistency, safety, and user-centric alignment
• Develop logic for hybrid model usage
• Collaborate with engineering to optimize latency, cost, and scalability

• Bring strong product judgement to the development of the MLOps platform, balancing researcher/data scientist workflows with engineering, security, and compliance constraints.
• Partner with multi-functional collaborators to define user needs, success metrics, and a prioritized roadmap for platform capabilities.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs across build vs. buy, usability vs. flexibility, and time-to-value vs. long-term scalability for ML platform components.

• MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in machine learning engineering or applied AI, with significant ownership of production systems (or equivalent experience).
• Deep expertise in computer vision-based deep learning.
• Demonstrated experience developing and deploying production models on cloud and edge.
• Strong product competence for ML platforms/MLOps, with the ability to translate multi-functional needs into a clear roadmap and excellent developer/researcher experiences.
• Advanced proficiency in PyTorch and the modern ML ecosystem.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience designing scalable ML systems.
• Proven track record to lead sophisticated technical initiatives and influence technical direction across teams.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills.

• Experience building or working on ML or developer platforms for data scientists and researchers, including driving adoption through documentation, templates, and self‑serve workflows.
• Familiarity with MLFlow, Kubeflow, or similar MLOps platforms.
• Experience developing AI systems in regulated environments (e.g., SaMD), such as surgical, medical imaging, or healthcare-related ML/AI applications, with attention to traceability, validation, and auditability.
• Experience with foundation models, multimodal AI, or vision‑language architectures.
• Prior experience mentoring or leading ML engineering teams.
• Experience working with large-scale datasets or distributed training systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Computing, Curious Mindset, Data Governance, Data Structures, Emerging Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Computer Relationships, Industry Analysis, Machine Learning (ML), Process Improvements, Program Management, Quality Assurance (QA), Research and Development, SAP Product Lifecycle Management, Scripting Languages, Tactical Planning, Technical Credibility

The anticipated base pay range for this position is: $ - $

Additional Description for Pay Transparency:

Subject to the terms of their respective plans, employees…