Associate Director, Evaluation and Quality Standards

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Job Description:

Evaluation & Quality Standards to join our Data Science and Digital Health team (DSDH). This is a newly created leadership role within the Generative AI organization, reporting directly to the Head of Generative AI.

The GenAI team is deploying AI across discovery, development, regulatory, and operations to create AI assistants and agentic systems across the therapeutic areas and functions. As we scale from proof-of-concept to enterprise deployment, we need a dedicated evaluation function that defines what quality means for generative AI in a regulated pharmaceutical R&D environment, communicates the metrics effectively, and enforces that standard across every platform, vendor, and capability we build or adopt. This role owns evaluation and governance for all generative AI work across R&D.

Evaluation Framework Design

•       Design and maintain evaluation frameworks for GenAI solutions spanning LLM quality, RAG performance, agent reliability, safety, and scientific accuracy.

•       Develop therapeutic-area-specific evaluation criteria with business teams, reflecting domain-specific quality requirements per therapeutic area and application type.

•       Define benchmarks for scientific validity, regulatory compliance, data quality, and operational reliability.

•       Establish gold-standard validation datasets and automated evaluation pipelines.

Vendor and Solution Assessment

•       Lead structured vendor assessments producing written Evaluation Reports

•       Challenge vendor claims with independent benchmarking; distinguish genuine capability from demonstration performance.

•       Assess integration complexity, total cost of ownership, regulatory posture, and vendor lock-in risk.

Governance and Standards

•       Serve as technical lead for the Evaluation & Standards Board, a cross-functional governance body for GenAI quality.

•       Present evaluation findings and recommendations to the GenAI Portfolio Steering Committee.

•       Define what “production-ready” means for GenAI in a regulated R&D environment and enforce that standard.

•       Set evaluation gates for product development stages: PoC, Limited Release, Scaled Product, and Product Ops.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

•       Partner with QMS/MLOps on the handoff from pre-adoption evaluation to production quality monitoring.

•       Work with therapeutic area teams on domain-specific evaluation standards.

•       Collaborate with Data Strategy & Products on data quality as an input to the evaluation rubric.

•       Engage JJIT architecture teams on platform-layer evaluation and security assessments.

Opinion Leadership and Capability Building

•       Contribute to the weekly GenAI Outlook newsletter, specifically the evaluation implications of frontier AI developments.

•       Build internal evaluation capability through training, documentation, and tooling for teams conducting assessments.

•       Publish evaluation standards and rubrics as reference material for the broader organization.

Team Leadership

•       Build and lead the GenAI Evaluation & Standards team

•       Attract, develop, and retain top talent in AI evaluation, quality science, and governance.

•       Establish a culture of scientific rigor and independent judgment within the team.

•       Not MLOps or production monitoring: the QMS function handles post-deployment operations.

•       Not platform engineering.

•       Not regulatory affairs or medical writing.

•       Not vendor management or procurement: evaluation is independent of purchasing.

•       Advanced degree (PhD strongly preferred) in computational biology, bioinformatics, data science, computer science, AI/ML, biomedical engineering, applied mathematics, or related discipline.

•       Minimum 8 years of post-academic industry experience, with significant time in pharmaceutical or biotechnology R&D.

•       Hands-on expertise with generative AI systems: large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic frameworks, and prompt engineering.

•       Demonstrated track record designing evaluation frameworks, scientific benchmarks, or quality standards for AI/ML systems.

•       Strong people leadership experience, including building and managing technical teams in a matrixed organization.

•       Excellent communication skills: ability to present complex technical findings clearly to non-technical senior stakeholders and defend unpopular conclusions.

•       Strategic thinking capability: ability to connect technical evaluation to business impact and organizational decision-making.

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The anticipated base pay range for this position is:

Benefits:

In addition to base pay, we offer the following benefits*: an annual bonus with set target (% of pay) depending on pay grade / location, where the actual amount is based on the employees’ and companies’ performance of the previous calendar year, or sales commissions. Moreover, we offer vacation days, parental leave for a minimum of 12 weeks, bereavement leave, caregiver leave, volunteer leave, well-being reimbursement, programs for financial, physical and mental health. We also offer service anniversary and recognition awards, and subject to the terms of their respective plans, employees - and in some location’s eligible dependents - can participate in several insurance plans. For more information, visit Employee benefits | Supporting well-being & career growth | Johnson & Johnson Careers.

*This is for informative purposes only. Amounts and actual benefits may vary by location and are subject to change.