Principal Scientist, Data Science (Translational Knowledge Engineering)

Location: Hybrid role based in Spring House, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Other listed job locations include Cambridge, Massachusetts; Horsham, Pennsylvania; Raritan, New Jersey; and Titusville, New Jersey.

Salary: $117,000–$201,250 base pay annually.

Company

Johnson & Johnson MedTech develops healthcare and innovative medicine solutions focused on preventing, treating, and curing complex diseases.

What you will do

• Design and maintain enterprise knowledge models spanning discovery biology, toxicology, safety pharmacology, pathology, clinical development, pharmacovigilance, and real-world evidence.
• Lead ontology strategy, development, governance, lifecycle management, and semantic quality procedures.
• Design RDF-based knowledge graph architectures, semantic mappings, inference rules, and reasoning frameworks.
• Build semantic foundations for GraphRAG, semantic retrieval, AI agents, and scientific reasoning systems.
• Harmonize translational data across standards and ontologies including SEND, SDTM, ADaM, MedDRA, HPO, MONDO, FHIR, OMOP, Cell Ontology, and Protein Ontology.
• Partner with scientists, safety experts, data scientists, AI engineers, platform teams, and external standards communities.

Requirements

• PhD or Master’s degree in biomedical informatics, bioinformatics, computational biology, computer science, information science, knowledge engineering, or a related scientific discipline.
• 5+ years of experience in biomedical informatics, semantic technologies, knowledge engineering, or scientific data architecture.
• Experience designing ontology-driven knowledge systems in life sciences, healthcare, or pharmaceutical R&D and working across multiple drug discovery and development phases.
• Deep expertise in ontology development and governance, knowledge representation, RDF, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL, and Semantic Web technologies.
• Strong experience with enterprise ontology platforms, RDF graph architectures, semantic APIs, and FAIR data principles.
• Strong familiarity with translational science, toxicology, safety pharmacology, clinical development, pharmacovigilance, or regulatory data standards.

Nice to have

• Experience building semantic foundations for AI, GraphRAG, agentic AI, or scientific reasoning systems.
• Familiarity with LLM-based retrieval and reasoning architectures.
• Experience with translational safety, efficacy, biomarker, or mechanistic reasoning use cases.
• Contributions to ontology standards, open-source biomedical ontologies, or scientific knowledge graph initiatives.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive work environment guided by the company’s Credo and focused on healthcare innovation.
• Hybrid work arrangement.
• Participation in retirement and savings plans, including pension and 401(k).
• Eligibility for a long-term incentive program.
• Vacation, sick time, holidays, parental leave, caregiver leave, bereavement leave, volunteer leave, and other paid time-off benefits.