Principal AI Engineer

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine•Raritan, NJ

7d•$102,000 - $177,100

About The Position

Johnson & Johnson is seeking a Principal AI Engineer for its Technology Services team in Raritan, New Jersey. The role leads modernization of the enterprise Generative AI platform on AWS, with a focus on governed use of GenAI and agentic AI capabilities and moving services from bespoke infrastructure to AWS cloud-native services. The engineer decides which capabilities should be replaced, retired, or remain custom, and engineers the AWS foundation, including Amazon Bedrock, the landing zone and multi-account architecture, and private networking and identity controls. The position establishes the AWS reference architecture, leads migration waves, promotes cloud-native-by-default development, and delivers GxP-qualified infrastructure for regulated workloads. It leads AWS platform engineers and agentic engineering capabilities and collaborates with the Azure platform engineering sub-team to maintain consistent foundational primitives where appropriate. The role reports to the Senior Manager, TS GenAI platform engineering.

Requirements

At least 8 years of progressive experience in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering, including at least 2 years of formal people leadership managing engineers or equivalent demonstrated leadership.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline.
Hands-on ownership of a production AWS estate at enterprise scale, including multi-account architecture and landing-zone design.
Experience delivering infrastructure primarily through Infrastructure as Code and replacing manual console changes with reviewed, versioned code.
Experience engineering cloud infrastructure in a regulated environment, such as GxP, validated systems, SOX, or a comparable audited control framework, and producing audit evidence.
Practical experience supporting AI, machine learning, or Generative AI workloads on AWS, including managed-inference networking, identity, and capacity considerations.
Demonstrated ability to improve cloud cost and performance through architectural changes without degrading service.
Experience working with a hyperscale cloud provider’s account and solutions-architecture teams on quotas, service adoption, and roadmap alignment.
Ability to communicate infrastructure trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including Quality, Security, and business partners.
Experience coaching senior individual contributors and supporting their technical growth without taking over their technical decisions.
Skills in cloud-native modernization and re-platforming; AWS Organizations, Control Tower, service control policies, and landing zones; Amazon Bedrock; AWS compute and data services; semantic layers and governed data access; AWS networking and IAM; Terraform and AWS CDK; migration engineering; AWS cost and reliability engineering; GxP qualification; and contractor and vendor management.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or Ph.D.
Experience leading a large-scale re-platform or cloud migration of an established production service, including legacy decommissioning.
Experience running Microsoft Azure alongside AWS and understanding where cross-cloud consistency is worthwhile.
AWS certifications such as Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, or Machine Learning Specialty.
Kubernetes platform engineering experience with GitOps delivery, cluster lifecycle management, and multi-tenancy.
Familiarity with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore sufficient to support agentic workloads.
Computer system validation experience for cloud infrastructure in a pharmaceutical or medical device setting.
Familiarity with Model Context Protocol and the AWS infrastructure needs of securely hosting MCP servers.
Experience with FinOps practices for AI and inference workloads.
Advanced analytics, coaching, computer programming, critical thinking, human-computer interaction, industry analysis, innovation, manufacturing technologies, organizing, presentation design, problem solving, prototyping, quality assurance, robotic automation, STEM application, software development management, solution architecture, technical credibility, and technical writing.

Responsibilities

Own the AWS GenAI cloud-native modernization roadmap; assess services and determine whether to replace, refactor, retain, or retire them, and re-platform services onto AWS offerings.
Define and enforce the AWS Well-Architected reference architecture and cloud-native-by-default standard, favoring managed orchestration and durable workflows.
Engineer AWS Bedrock access and quotas, landing zone and multi-account architecture, networking, and least-privilege IAM in collaboration with Cloud and ISRM teams.
Codify infrastructure using Terraform and AWS CDK, including modules, pipelines, drift detection, and policy-as-code, replacing manual console changes.
Plan and execute migration waves using cutover strategies, backward-compatible APIs, data migration, documented rollback, and production validation before decommissioning replacements.
Deliver GxP-qualified AWS infrastructure under agreed change control and partner with GenAI governance on guardrail, identity, and traceability controls.
Engineer the hosting substrate for enterprise platform capabilities and supporting semantic, retrieval, and evaluation services.
Own cost, performance, and resilience engineering, including tagging and showback, commitment discounts, inference efficiency, availability design, capacity planning, disaster recovery, observability, and reporting.
Lead, coach, and develop the AWS platform engineering team; oversee timely delivery, budget optimization, engineering quality, and LFRP planning.
Own the AWS partnership and cross-cloud alignment through architecture reviews, quota negotiations, emerging-capability position papers, agentic software-development adoption, and coordination with the Azure platform engineering sub-team.

Benefits

Participation in the company’s consolidated retirement plan (pension) and savings plan (401(k)), subject to plan terms.
Vacation: 120 hours per calendar year.
Sick time: 40 hours per calendar year, with specified higher allowances for eligible employees in Colorado and Washington.
Holiday pay, including floating holidays: 13 days per calendar year.
Work, Personal and Family Time: up to 40 hours per calendar year.
Parental leave: 480 hours within one year of a child’s birth, adoption, or foster care placement.
Bereavement leave: up to 240 hours for an immediate family member and 40 hours for an extended family member per calendar year.
Caregiver leave: 80 hours in a 52-week rolling period.
Volunteer leave: 32 hours per calendar year.
Military spouse time-off: 80 hours per calendar year.