Principal Software Engineer - Tech Lead

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

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 Software Engineer – Technical Lead, within the Polyphonic® Product Engineering team located in Santa Clara, CA. Johnson & Johnson is building the next generation of intelligence infrastructure and platforms to capture, extract, and apply intelligence from the OR and surgical workflows. This is an opportunity to work with a multi-disciplinary team of product managers, applied scientists, software engineers, and clinical experts who will push the boundaries for surgical AI and make it widely accessible. ML Platform is central to scaling training and inference across millions of video frames and images and drives core AI functionality for the developer workflows. We build primitives and foundational capabilities that would let internal and external teams train, evaluate, deploy, operate and monitor models quickly and compliantly, essentially automating experimentation to production workflows. We’re looking for a Principal Engineer who treats platform as a product and can turn complex ML/AI workflows into clear, durable APIs and easy-to-use CLIs/UIs that data scientists and developers would love. This role blends product thinking, developer experience, backend engineering, and fluid user experience combining deep code vs no-code. Hands on ML experience is a plus.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or MS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a similar technical field.
5+ years of system design experience upon which to draw to build a scalable, reliable ML platform.
Proficiency in API design and developer experience—gRPC/REST APIs, SDKs, CLIs, and simple UIs that developers love to use.
Experience with the end-to-end ML model lifecycle such as model serving, training, model CI/CD, and GPU resources management, and have built ML platform features that are delightful to use.
Seasoned coder; you love not only to design and communicate ideas but also to actually ship product.
You obsess about refining developer experience and reducing friction
Passionate about supporting ML engineers to meet and understand their needs, and translating them into clean, durable platform abstractions.
You're passionate about infrastructure as code and automating painful manual processes.
You advocate for platform solutions that don’t leave on-call teams guessing.
A clear communicator who excels at both written and verbal communication across differing levels of technical details.

Nice To Haves

Innovation
Mentorship
Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
Project Management
Report Writing
Requirements Analysis
Research and Development
Researching
SAP Product Lifecycle Management
Scripting Languages
Software Acquisitions
Software Development Management
Software Engineering Practices
Software Quality Assurance (SQA)
Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
Tactical Planning
Technical Credibility
Technologically Savvy

Responsibilities

Bring technical ownership of a platform as a product and ship scalable APIs, SDKs, CLIs, and UIs that make ML platform easy to adopt and cater specifically to accelerate surgical AI.
Build shared ML infra with the platform infrastructure team and principal engineers for the infrastructure team to develop/extend core components: Serving Layer, Model Registry, Pipeline Orchestrator, and Training/Inference control planes.
Design great developer experiences with defined templates, golden paths, opinionated defaults, and clear documentation to reduce time to first production.
Develop instrumentation to measure adoption, friction, reliability, and cost; use data to prioritize roadmap and validate outcomes.
Partner across organizations (ML Engineering, Data Science, Infra/SRE, Security, Finance) to optimize performance, safety, and spend, especially for GPU intensive training and highQPS inference.
Stay up to date with industry trends in machine learning and infrastructure to ensure the adoption of groundbreaking technologies and practices.

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 period10 days
Volunteer Leave – 32 hours per calendar year
Military Spouse Time-Off – 80 hours per calendar year