Sr Eng RD Soft Eng

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.

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Job Description

The Lead Software Engineer for R&D Technology is responsible for the design and delivery of solutions that underpin next-generation R&D capabilities across small molecules, peptides, and oligonucleotides. This role bridges scientific needs with scalable technology solutions, ensuring automation, data, and digital platforms accelerate DMTA cycles and enable high-quality decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Design, build and support integrations across core business lab systems
• Define and maintain the Engineering and Technology architecture vision, roadmap, and standards for the Synthetics Development domain.
• Lead the technical architecture across squads, ensuring alignment to enterprise patterns, reusable components, and modern engineering practices.
• Drive evaluation, design, and selection of technical solution options; build, test, and validate architectural concepts and prototypes; contribute production code to critical technical paths.
• Translate sophisticated business and scientific requirements into scalable and actionable technical designs.
• Drive technical decisions to ensure long-term sustainability.
• Collaborate with platform and product teams to leverage of enterprise capabilities (AWS, data platforms, workflow engines, lab systems).

Engineering Excellence & Operations

• Develop a technical understanding of the existing lab systems, their business use cases and how to build integrations with them.
• Own CI/CD pipeline architecture and automation strategy.
• Establish observability and operational excellence standards across platforms.
• Manage technical debt and maintain system health through proactive refactoring and modernization.
• Manage development and review cadence; align technology landscape across squads to promote interoperability, modularity, and scalability.

Team Leadership & Development

• Mentor and develop engineering talent across squads.
• Establish engineering standards and review practices.
• Lead technical hiring and team scaling.

Governance & Lifecycle Management

• Own lifecycle management for domain technologies, including the Product API catalog and integrations governance.
• Ensure architectural compliance with security, privacy, data governance, and regulatory standards.
• Establish policies and standards for responsible AI tool usage in regulated/validated environments.
• Monitor emerging technology trends in lab automation, cloud engineering, AI/ML, and scientific computing.
• Conduct research spikes and feasibility assessments for new capabilities relevant to synthetic workflows and workflow automation.

Qualifications

Required

• 5-7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Track record of leading technical initiatives from concept to production.
• Strong foundational skills in IT, including database design, data engineering, cloud computing, and architecture principles.
• Proven track record to translate sophisticated scientific and business needs into practical technical solutions.
• Experience designing systems handling regulated/validated data.
• Understanding of GxP or regulated system requirements.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms and technologies (AWS, Lambda, Step Functions, Docker, Kubernetes).
• Expertise in API design, microservices patterns, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong data modeling and schema evolution expertise.
• Experience with testing strategies and quality engineering practices.
• Experience establishing engineering practices and tooling across teams.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Kiro, Claude Code) to improve engineering efficiency.
• Proficiency in Python for prototyping, integration, or workflow automation.
• Proven experience owning products or platforms throughout their lifecycle in a multi-team environment.
• Strong interpersonal and negotiation skills with the ability to influence and build trusted partnerships across functions.
• Experience in leading a team of external resources.
• Experience delivering high-quality digital solutions including dependency management, release planning, change control, validation, and governance.
• Familiarity with SDLC methodologies and software validation practices.

Preferred

• Experience in pharmaceutical discovery or development environments.
• Experience with lab-specific systems such as ELN, LIMS, SDMS, or automation control software.

Johnson & Johnson is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by federal, state or local law. We actively seek qualified candidates who are protected veterans and individuals with disabilities as defined under VEVRAA and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Johnson & Johnson is committed to providing an interview process that is inclusive of our applicants’ needs. If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request an accommodation, external applicants please contact us via https://www.jnj.com/contact-us/careers, internal employees contact AskGS to be directed to your accommodation resource.

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