Principal Data Engineer – AI & Generative AI Platforms

About the role

Johnson & Johnson is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the design and evolution of AI‑ready data platforms. The role focuses on building scalable, governed infrastructure that supports advanced analytics, machine learning and next‑generation Generative AI workloads across the enterprise.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and implement core data platform capabilities for AI, ML and Generative AI, ensuring performance, cost efficiency and strong governance.
• Design and operate scalable pipelines for structured and unstructured data ingestion (batch and streaming) with data quality checks, lineage capture and service level agreements.
• Create reusable data services and APIs that enable large language model (LLM) integration, knowledge retrieval, vector search and Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) use cases.
• Define reference architectures, engineering standards and technical direction for cross‑team AI data ecosystems.
• Balance cost, risk, performance and compliance when selecting architectural components such as knowledge graphs, semantic layers and LLM‑powered applications.

Required profile

• Proven experience leading data engineering initiatives at enterprise scale, preferably in a regulated industry.
• Deep understanding of AI/ML data requirements, including training and inference workloads.
• Strong ability to translate business needs into technical designs that are secure, governed and cost‑effective.
• Excellent communication skills to align multiple engineering teams and stakeholders.

Required skills

• Data engineering
• AI platform engineering
• Machine learning pipelines
• Generative AI concepts
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Vector search
• Knowledge graphs
• Semantic layers
• Large language models (LLMs)