Principal AI Lead – Surgical AI

Johnson & Johnson•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

At Johnson & Johnson, we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build a world where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured, where treatments are smarter and less invasive, and solutions are personal. Through our expertise in Innovative Medicine and MedTech, we are uniquely positioned to innovate across the full spectrum of healthcare solutions today to deliver the breakthroughs of tomorrow, and profoundly impact health for humanity. Learn more at jnj.com As guided by Our Credo, Johnson & Johnson is responsible to our employees who work with us throughout the world. We provide an inclusive work environment where each person is considered as an individual. At Johnson & Johnson, we respect the diversity and dignity of our employees and recognize their merit. 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. We are recruiting for a Principal AI Lead within the Polyphonic® Applied AI and ML team located in Santa Clara, CA . J&J is building the next generation intelligence infrastructure and platforms to capture, extract, and apply intelligence from the OR and surgical workflows and this role will play a key role in shaping and defining core workflows for developing and deploying surgical AI models and agents for the clinical consumption. This is an opportunity to work with a multi-functional high-value team of product managers, applied scientists, software engineers, and clinical experts who will push the boundaries for surgical AI and make it widely accessible. The candidate will own and drive technical direction across the full ML lifecycle—from research and model development to scalable deployment, bringing both deep technical expertise and strong product acuity to build the right platform and user experiences for data scientists and developers, while mentoring engineers and partnering closely with product, engineering, and clinical domain experts.

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.
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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

AI Development Standardization
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
Applied AI/ML Features & Model Strategy
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
Model Integration & Inference Optimization
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
Product Acuity
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.

Benefits

Subject to the terms of their respective plans, employees are eligible to participate in the Company’s consolidated retirement plan (pension) and savings plan (401(k)).
This position is eligible to participate in the Company’s long-term incentive program.
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
Parental Leave – 480 hours within one year of the birth/adoption/foster care of a child
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
10 days Volunteer Leave – 32 hours per calendar year
Military Spouse Time-Off – 80 hours per calendar year