Principal Data Engineer

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 https://www.jnj.com

Job Function:

Data Analytics & Computational Sciences

Job Sub Function:

Data Engineering

Job Category:

Scientific/Technology

All Job Posting Locations:

Jacksonville, Florida, United States of America

Job Description:

We are currently recruiting for Principal Data Engineer based in Jacksonville FL, Raritan NJ, Spring House PA, Irvine, CA or any other J&J East Coast locations.

​Come be part of a dynamic and global team!

About Vision

Fueled by innovation at the intersection of biology and technology, we’re developing the next generation of smarter, less invasive, more personalized treatments.

Are you passionate about improving and expanding on the possibilities of vision treatments? Ready to join a team that’s reimagining how vision is improved? Our Vision team solves the toughest health challenges. Help combine cutting-edge insights, science, technology, and people to encourage eye care professionals and patients to proactively protect, correct and enhance healthy sight for life. Our products and services address these needs – from the pediatric to aging eye – in a patient’s lifetime.

Your unique talents will help patients on their journey to wellness. Learn more at https://www.jnj.com/medtech

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain the data infrastructure that powers our analytics, AI, and machine learning solutions.

As the first dedicated global data engineering lead on the team, you will establish best-in-class data engineering practices, enabling our data scientists to focus on model development and analytics while ensuring data pipelines are reliable, secure, and scalable.

This role will also partner closely with data governance professionals to embed governance and compliance requirements directly into our data architecture, ensuring data quality, lineage, and policy adoption across the enterprise.

The Principal Data Engineer will:

• Work closely with data scientists to understand their data needs and enable rapid experimentation through efficient, reusable pipelines.

• Provide engineering support for feature engineering, data preparation, and production model integration.

• Help create shared tools, libraries, and templates for AI/ML projects. 

• Design, develop, and maintain ETL/ELT processes and automated data pipelines across structured and unstructured sources.

• Optimize data workflows for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency in cloud environments.

• Implement robust data quality monitoring and logging solutions.

• Build data architecture frameworks that support advanced analytics, AI, and reporting use cases.

• Collaborate with data governance leads to ensure adoption of updated data policies across all engineering workflows.

• Integrate data lineage tracking and metadata management into pipelines.

• Ensure compliance with data privacy laws, security policies, and responsible AI guidelines.

• Drive internal education and best practice sessions on compliant data handling.

• Perform other related tasks as assigned by management

Required Qualifications

• Master’s Degree / PhD + 4 years’ experience, OR Bachelor’s Degree + 6 years’ experience

• Educational degree in quantitative field, such as Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Economics, and/or related quantitative

• Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python for data processing, transformation, and automation.