Sr Mgr, Forward Deployed Engineer, Research Systems

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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The Senior Manager, Research IT Systems is a people leader accountable for the strategy, delivery, integration, and lifecycle management of digital platforms that enable pharmaceutical research across spectrum. The role leads a team of technical specialists and partners with scientists, product leaders, architects, quality, security, data, and platform teams to translate research priorities into secure, scalable, compliant, and user-centred technology capabilities. This leader will build organizational capability, modernize the research technology landscape, and ensure that laboratory systems, scientific data, automation, and digital workflows accelerate Design-Make-Test-Analyze cycles and high-quality scientific decision-making.

• Lead, coach, and develop a multi-disciplinary team that may include software engineers, application developers, business systems analysts, technical product owners, integration specialists, and platform leads.
• Set clear objectives, establish accountability, conduct meaningful performance and career-development conversations, and build succession and capability plans.
• Own workforce planning, role design, hiring, onboarding, retention, and the effective use of employees, contractors, and strategic partners.
• Create an inclusive, high-performing culture focused on scientific impact, engineering excellence, customer partnership, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Develop future leaders and delegate platform, product, and delivery accountabilities to appropriate team members while maintaining effective oversight.
• Define team operating mechanisms, capacity plans, communities of practice, and technical standards that enable consistent delivery across multiple products and squads.

• Partner with research scientists and R&D leaders to understand scientific workflows, identify high-value technology opportunities, and shape an integrated Research IT strategy and roadmap.
• Own a portfolio of research systems and capabilities, aligning priorities, investments, resources, dependencies, risks, and outcomes with business and scientific objectives.
• Represent Research IT in governance forums and communicate strategy, progress, decisions, risks, and value to senior stakeholders.
• Build trusted partnerships across Product Management, Enterprise Architecture, Data and AI, Cybersecurity, Quality, Privacy, Infrastructure, and global R&D functions.
• Champion user-centred discovery, product adoption, change management, and measurable value realization across scientific communities.
• Supervise external trends in research informatics, laboratory automation, scientific computing, cloud, data, and AI and translate them into pragmatic opportunities.

• Provide strategic and technical oversight for research platforms such as ELN, LIMS, SDMS, laboratory instrument integrations, workflow solutions, scientific data platforms, and automation capabilities.
• Define target-state architecture, product roadmaps, integration patterns, reusable services, data flows, and modernization plans in partnership with enterprise and solution architects.
• Ensure solutions are interoperable, scalable, reliable, supportable, secure, and aligned with enterprise architecture and cloud standards.
• Guide technical design decisions across APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, workflow orchestration, data models, identity, observability, and platform engineering.
• Drive rationalization of fragmented applications and technical debt while protecting business continuity and scientific productivity.
• Enable responsible adoption of AI-assisted research and engineering capabilities, with appropriate governance for regulated and validated environments.

• Lead delivery across multiple products and workstreams using Agile and product operating model principles, from discovery and business case through implementation, adoption, operations, and retirement.
• Establish portfolio governance, delivery cadences, outcome metrics, release plans, dependency management, financial controls, and transparent risk escalation.
• Ensure engineering excellence across secure SDLC, CI/CD, automated testing, validation, documentation, observability, incident management, service management, and production readiness.
• Own service reliability and lifecycle health for assigned platforms, including upgrades, capacity, resilience, disaster recovery, vendor roadmaps, technical debt, and end-of-life planning.
• Manage strategic suppliers and delivery partners through clear outcomes, statements of work, service levels, quality measures, performance evaluations, and commercial discipline.
• Use operational, adoption, delivery, quality, and financial metrics to drive prioritization and continuous improvement.

• Ensure research systems align with applicable security, privacy, data integrity, records management, intellectual property, quality, and regulatory requirements.
• Partner with Quality and business system owners to apply risk-based computer system validation, change control, periodic review, audit-trail review, and inspection-readiness practices where required.
• Maintain clear system ownership, decision rights, controls, documentation, and traceability throughout the technology lifecycle.
• Lead or support major incident, deviation, audit, and corrective-and-preventive-action activities, ensuring root causes and systemic improvements are addressed.
• Promote responsible AI, data stewardship, and secure-by-design behaviours across the team and partner ecosystem.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, or a related discipline; an advanced degree is advantageous.
• 15+ years of progressive experience in technology product management, software engineering, research informatics, laboratory systems, or enterprise application delivery.
• 7+ years of formal people-leadership experience, including direct management of managers, technical leads, or multiple individual contributors in a matrixed or global environment.
• Demonstrated success building, developing, and retaining high-performing technical teams and leading workforce planning, hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Proven ownership of a portfolio of complex technology products or platforms from strategy and investment planning through delivery, operations, modernization, and retirement.
• Experience partnering with scientific or R&D stakeholders and translating complex research needs into practical technology strategies, roadmaps, and solutions.
• Solid understanding of enterprise architecture, cloud platforms, application integration, APIs, data management, DevSecOps, observability, and modern engineering practices.
• Experience with laboratory or research systems and integrations, such as ELN, LIMS, SDMS, instrument software, workflow platforms, or scientific data environments.
• Understanding of regulated or validated systems, risk-based computer system validation, data integrity, change control, secure SDLC, and applicable GxP principles.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple initiatives, budgets, capacity, vendors, dependencies, risk, quality, and executive-level communications.
• Strong critical thinking, business insight, decision-making, negotiation, and influencing skills, with the ability to operate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and a record of building trusted partnerships across global, cross-functional organizations.

• Experience supporting pharmaceutical discovery, medicinal chemistry, synthetic development, biologics, or other research-intensive life sciences environments.
• Experience leading managers or senior technical leads and scaling a multi-layered organisation across locations.
• Knowledge of Design-Make-Test-Analyze workflows, laboratory automation, scientific computing, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, high-performance computing, or AI/ML-enabled research.
• Experience modernizing legacy research platforms and integrating laboratory systems with cloud, data, workflow, and analytics services.
• Relevant certifications in cloud, product management, Agile, architecture, service management, or project/program management.

Johnson & Johnson is an Affirmative Action and 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, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

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