Sr Director/Scientific Fellow, AI Safety, R&D Data Science and Digital Health
$196,000–$342,700 year
On-site · Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States or San Diego, California, United States
Job Summary
Senior Scientific Fellow in AI Safety within Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, R&D Data Science & Digital Health. This highly technical leadership role embeds safety, robustness, and observability into the design, evaluation, and deployment of advanced AI systems across discovery, development, clinical, and regulatory workflows. Responsibilities include defining multi-year research priorities and capability roadmaps; providing technical leadership on safety principles for foundation models, generative AI, and agentic systems; conducting safety-focused model design, stress testing for hallucinations and failure propagation; contributing to policy, governance, and external collaborations; securing funding for AI safety initiatives; and representing J&J externally through talks, publications, patents, and leadership roles. The role requires collaboration with AI scientists, engineers, QA, regulatory affairs, quantitative scientists, and JJ Technology to ensure AI systems deployed in R&D are safe, trustworthy, and fit-for-purpose as AI capability scales; mentorship and community contributions within the IM R&D Fellow ecosystem are expected.
Required Qualifications
- PhD or equivalent advanced degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related field
- Minimum of 10 years of post-academic, industry experience
- Proven track record with modern AI systems including foundation models, multimodal generative AI, large reasoning models or agentic systems
- Extensive experience with AI safety, robustness, reliability, or evaluation in high-impact or high-stakes domains
- Demonstrated ability to reason about system-level behavior, failure modes, and risk beyond model accuracy
- Excellent coding and software development capabilities
- Experience working in highly interdisciplinary and matrixed environments spanning AI, data science, engineering, and life science
- Strong communication skills and ability to influence AI model and systems design without formal authority
- Experience in the Life Sciences, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical or Medical Tech sector is preferred
Apply with one swipe on Sorce. We auto-fill applications and apply on your behalf — no cover letters, no 40-minute forms.
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.