Principal AI Lead – Surgical AI

About the role

Johnson & Johnson MedTech 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.

Responsibilities

• Standardize structured pipelines (ingestion to production), planning flows, and agentic workflows
• Develop capability primitives such as pre-built models, feature stores, AI-assisted annotations, and 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
• Made pragmatic tradeoffs across build vs. buy, usability vs. flexibility, and time-to-value vs. long-term scalability for ML platform components

Requirements

• 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
• Advanced proficiency in PyTorch and the modern ML ecosystem
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience designing scalable ML systems
• Prior experience mentoring or leading ML engineering teams
• Experience working with large-scale datasets or distributed training systems

Qualifications

• 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

Skills

• 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

Benefits

For additional general information on Company benefits, please go to: - https://www.careers.jnj.com/employee-benefits

Pay

The anticipated base pay range for this position is: $157,000.00 - $271,400.00

Schedule

Subject to the terms of their respective policies and date of hire, employees are eligible for the following time off benefits:

• Vacation – 120 hours per calendar year
• Sick time – 40 hours per calendar year; for employees who reside in the State of Colorado – 48 hours per calendar year; for employees who reside in the State of Washington – 56 hours per calendar year
• Holiday pay, including Floating Holidays – 13 days per calendar year
• Work, Personal and Family Time – up to 40 hours per calendar year
• Bereavement Leave – 240 hours for an immediate family member: 40 hours for an extended family member per calendar year
• Caregiver Leave – 80 hours in a 52-week rolling period
• Parental Leave – 480 hours within one year of the birth/adoption/foster care of a child
• Volunteer Leave – 32 hours per calendar year
• Military Spouse Time-Off – 80 hours per calendar year