Senior Manager, External Innovation and Partnerships

Johnson & Johnson • New Brunswick, MA

15h • Hybrid

About The Position

The Technology Strategy & External Innovation organization drives future-focused technology strategy, identifies innovation opportunities, and shapes technology partnerships across Innovative Medicine, MedTech, and corporate functions. As Senior Manager, External Innovation & Technology Partnerships, you will identify, evaluate, and advance high-potential technology companies and partners across deep tech and enterprise technology domains—including AI, enterprise software, data infrastructure, security, cloud/edge technologies, advanced compute, and quantum computing. You will build clear investment and partnering theses around emerging technology trends, translate technical signals into actionable opportunity areas, and deliver a qualified pipeline of external partners that can address J&J’s critical enterprise priorities. This role is ideal for a technically fluent ecosystem builder who can move between technology understanding, partner discovery, strategic thesis development, and hands-on execution—while helping shape partner roadmaps toward meaningful enterprise impact.

Requirements

• 4–6+ years in enterprise technology, technical strategy, product, engineering-adjacent roles, venture/startup ecosystem engagement, external innovation, or related fields.
• Strong familiarity with enterprise software, AI/ML, data platforms, security, cloud infrastructure, advanced compute, or other deep tech domains relevant to large-scale enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated ability to build a thesis on an emerging technology trend, define where value may emerge, and translate that thesis into a focused sourcing and partner pipeline.
• Proven experience communicating to executive audiences and building compelling presentations that influence decisions.
• Ability to evaluate technical differentiation, implementation feasibility, integration considerations, and likely enterprise impact in partnership opportunities.
• Experience building relationships across startups, venture-backed companies, enterprise vendors, research organizations, and internal technical stakeholders.
• Strong relationship-building skills and ability to influence across technical and business teams.
• Comfort working with technical teams and translating between engineering, architecture, product, business, and executive audiences.
• Self-starter with strong ownership, urgency, and comfort operating in ambiguity.
• Genuine passion for healthcare and the potential of technology to improve outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Technical, engineering, computer science, product, or enterprise architecture background strongly preferred.
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, applied sciences, or a related technical field a plus.
• Experience navigating deep tech or enterprise technology ecosystems and identifying early companies with potential to influence enterprise capabilities or future technology roadmaps.
• Experience in executive communication and presenting strategic opportunities to leadership
• Familiarity with partner evaluation, RFI/RFP processes, due diligence, or technology pilot design.
• Exposure to AI engineering, MLOps, LLMOps, model lifecycle tooling, or production deployment patterns for AI-enabled products is a plus.
• Familiarity with agentic AI platforms, orchestration patterns, retrieval, tool use, human review workflows, or reusable AI development accelerators is helpful.
• Knowledge of knowledge graphs, semantic layers, ontologies, vector databases, embedding pipelines, or context engineering patterns is beneficial.
• Awareness of AI evaluation, scorecards, observability, model monitoring, drift detection, responsible AI controls, or value measurement approaches is a plus.
• Practical understanding of AI cost drivers, tokenomics, model selection tradeoffs, inference costs, caching, routing, or cloud/GPU cost management would be valuable.
• Familiarity with AI security, red-teaming, model risk, prompt injection, data leakage, third-party model governance, licensing, SLAs, or enterprise GenAI governance is helpful.

Responsibilities

• Develop clear theses on emerging technology trends, ecosystems, and capability gaps that matter to J&J’s enterprise technology agenda.
• Translate technical, market, and ecosystem signals into actionable implications for enterprise architecture, product roadmaps, operating models, and strategic partnerships.
• Assess companies, technologies, and technical differentiation with enough depth to separate durable capability from hype.
• Lead work across a cross-functional team to gather input and consensus on strategic insights and outcomes.
• Shape outcomes in a matrixed operating environment harnessing insights from business groups, technology and external ecosystem partners
• Build, codify, and maintain a repeatable sourcing and external engagement approach for deep tech, enterprise software, AI, infrastructure, security, and other priority technology domains.
• Define sourcing hypotheses, technical evaluation criteria, search strategies, and workflows that move opportunities from discovery to assessment, engagement, pilot design, and progression.
• Create internal guidance, playbooks, templates, governance, and decision-gate mechanisms for evaluating external partners.
• Map and actively cultivate the external ecosystem across startups, enterprise vendors, venture networks, research labs, academia, and strategic technology partners.
• Engage promising companies early, build trusted relationships, and help shape partner roadmaps toward J&J-relevant enterprise use cases.
• Own partnering across senior leaders and engineers across J&J Technology to assess opportunities and own the analysis, synthesis, and communication of opportunity assessments, feasibility evaluations, strategic fit, and expected outcomes for technology leadership.
• Build crisp, executive-ready presentations articulating: technology impact on business and IT outcomes value cases and adoption rationale risks, integration considerations, and time-to-value
• Advocate for bold, thesis-driven opportunities by combining thoughtful analysis, executive-ready communication, empathy for enterprise readiness, and constructive challenge with business and technology stakeholders.
• Develop a consistent methodology for opportunity scoring and measuring impact from programs.
• Develop clear, succinct executive-level narratives and visual communication that articulate technology strategies and their impact on enterprise IT outcomes.
• Present recommendations to senior leaders with confidence, clarity, and strong storytelling.
• Bring structure, operational discipline, and momentum to complex, ambiguous initiatives.

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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree