Principal Scientific Data Curator

Johnson & Johnson is seeking a highly experienced Senior Scientific Data Curator to support enterprise-level curation, metadata strategy, and data governance across preclinical, translational, and clinical R&D. This is a fully remote, year-long contract role supporting high-impact analytics, regulatory readiness, and cross-program data integration in a fast-paced, regulated pharmaceutical environment.

This role sits at the intersection of science, data platforms, and product leadership and partners closely with clinical, data science, engineering, and IT teams across the organization.

• Provide expert curation and annotation of complex scientific and clinical data assets, including:
• Anatomical and tissue data
• Assay and experimental metadata
• Biomarker and multi-omics datasets
• Clinical trial and clinical operations data
• Real‑World Data (RWD)
• Medical imaging data
• FDA and regulatory feedback artifacts
• Perform SDTM-aligned curation to support regulatory compliance and submission readiness.
• Curate oncology clinical trial laboratory, biomarker, and imaging datasets for downstream analytics and reporting.
• Support microbiome and metagenomic sequencing studies through metadata sourcing, annotation, and quality review.
• Design, implement, and maintain enterprise metadata frameworks, controlled vocabularies, and cataloging standards.
• Apply disease, literature, and ontology‑based annotations to enable cross‑study and cross‑program data integration.
• Harmonize metadata across preclinical, translational, and clinical domains.
• Define, monitor, and continuously improve data quality control (QC) metrics and validation processes.
• Support data modeling efforts aligned with platform architecture and analytics use cases.

• Partner closely with data platform engineering teams to enable scalable ingestion and curation workflows.
• Collaborate with software developers to design and implement automation for metadata population and validation within the enterprise data catalog.
• Curate and integrate data from internal and external sources, including:
• cBio Portal
• GTEx
• Open Targets
• TCGA
• Uni Prot
• Leverage enterprise engineering tools and workflows, including HTML and Git/Git Hub.

• Contribute to enterprise data governance initiatives, including stewardship models, data standards, and data lifecycle management.
• Ensure curated data assets meet expectations for auditability, traceability, and regulatory inspection readiness.
  
  Promote and operationalize FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) across the data platform.

• Provide technical project leadership across clinical, translational science, data science, and IT stakeholders.
• Act as an internal product owner for data catalog and curation capabilities by:
• Gathering and prioritizing user requirements
• Tracking feature requests and defects
• Coordinating testing and validation with end users
• Partner with platform teams and external vendors to align roadmap priorities and delivery timelines.
• Apply Agile methodologies to manage deliverables in a regulated pharmaceutical environment.

• Apply scientific domain expertise across multiple therapeutic areas, including:
• Oncology
• Cardiovascular diseases
• Gastrointestinal diseases
• Immune and infectious diseases
• Metabolic diseases
• Neurologic diseases and neuroscience
• Support preclinical (in vivo rodent) and wet‑lab data curation with a strong focus on translational relevance.

• PhD in a life sciences discipline with strong grounding in biology and experimental data interpretation.
• Experience supporting enterprise data platforms within pharmaceutical or biotech R&D environments.
• Deep understanding of clinical trial data standards, metadata management, and regulatory considerations.
• Proven ability to bridge scientific, technical, and product-focused teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for both scientific and non‑scientific audiences.