Director, World Model & Agentic Learning

Director, World Model & Agentic Learning

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine is recruiting a Director, World Model & Agentic Learning to join our Data, Data Science & AI organization. This is a newly created leadership role within the Generative AI organization, reporting directly to the Head of Generative AI.
You will lead the AI science team that builds our enterprise world model and agentic-learning capability for the R&D agentic AI platform, a reusable, expert-curated foundation that domain teams customize, together with the mechanisms by which it improves with use. This is a durable, product-agnostic capability. You will devise the approach, set the technical direction, and lead the team that delivers it.
The role carries two co-equal mandates:
World Model: how agents represent and reason against accumulated domain understanding, instead of re-deriving everything from raw sources on each task.
Agentic Learning: how that understanding grows with use, i.e. getting better from operation, rather than from retraining foundational models.
Key Responsibilities
World Model
Design how agents represent accumulated domain understanding and reason against it, rather than re-deriving knowledge from raw sources on each task.
Build mechanisms for the system to represent its own confidence, boundaries, gaps, and contradictions explicitly.
Ensure knowledge earned in one domain or workflow compounds and surfaces wherever else it is relevant.
Serve the representation to the reasoning agents as queryable, grounded knowledge with provenance and confidence, and curate what they propose back by validating, deduplicating, and resolving conflicts.
Build on the platform's existing context, memory, and governed data layers, referencing canonical entities rather than rebuilding data pipelines.
Agentic Learning
Design the mechanisms that turn operation into improvement. For example, active learning from expert corrections, memory-based / in-context learning, or outcome-driven refinement.
Make every run, expert correction, and decision outcome a signal that improves the next result.
Keep institutional understanding fresh and honest as sources, evidence, and experts change over time.
Expert Partnership
Partner with scientists and domain experts so their expertise becomes something the system can apply consistently at scale.
Keep experts authoritative: the system maintains and applies their judgment; it never overrides it.
Accountability & Evaluation
Define and prove the accountability bar: demonstrate that the system produces better decisions over time.
Make every conclusion auditable and reconstructable, and judge decisions against their real-world outcomes.
Partner with the J&J Technology, Generative AI evaluation, and the AI operations teams, consuming their per-decision outcome signals as the learning signal and validating decision-quality improvement rigorously.
Team Leadership
Recruit, build, and lead a team of 48 AI scientists.
Attract, develop, and retain top talent in continual learning, knowledge representation, and agentic systems.
Establish a culture of scientific rigor, ownership, and accountability within the team.
What This Role Is Not
Not a generation-first role: the hard problem here is knowledge accumulation and learning over time, not content generation

though the system uses generative models throughout.
Not platform or application engineering: the Generative AI Platform team owns the R&D agentic platform and its deployment surfaces.
Not evaluation governance: the Generative AI evaluation function owns independent evaluation; this role partners with it.
Not the data or memory substrate: the platform's governed data and context/memory layers manage data and orchestration. This role references and builds on them

it does not rebuild pipelines or own the memory plumbing.
You Might Be Right If
You've built systems where knowledge accumulation and continual learning were the hard problem, not generation.
You think about large language models as reasoning engines that need structured knowledge to reason against

and structured feedback to improve from.
You've designed learning loops that don't depend on retraining: active learning from expert corrections, memory-based / in-context learning, outcome-driven refinement.
You believe the right test of an AI system is the quality of decisions it produces over time

and that those decisions are themselves the signal it learns from.
You've worked at the intersection of AI and domain experts in regulated or high-stakes environments.
You can hold the architecture in your head and the team accountable to it.
Key Qualifications
Minimum 8 years of post-academic industry experience building and shipping AI/ML systems, with significant time owning technical architecture.
Deep, hands-on expertise with modern AI systems: large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic frameworks, and knowledge representation.
Demonstrated track record designing systems where knowledge accumulation, memory, or continual learning was the central technical challenge.
Experience designing systems that learn and improve from real-world operation and expert feedback (e.g., active learning, in-context / memory-based learning, outcome-driven refinement).
Strong people leadership experience, including recruiting, building, and leading technical or scientific teams in a matrixed organization.
Ability to set and defend a technical architecture and hold a team accountable to it.
Excellent communication skills: able to align scientists, engineers, domain experts, and senior stakeholders around a technical strategy.
Preferred Qualifications
Advanced degree (PhD preferred) in computer science, AI/ML, applied mathematics, computational science, or a related discipline.
Experience working at the intersection of AI and domain experts in regulated or high-stakes environments (e.g., life sciences, healthcare, finance).
Background in life sciences, drug discovery, or pharmaceutical R&D, or a demonstrated ability to ramp quickly in a scientific domain.
Experience working with knowledge graphs, ontologies, structured memory, or other explicit knowledge representations.
Track record of building auditable, traceable AI systems where decisions must be reconstructed and defended.
Publications or recognized contributions in continual learning, agentic systems, knowledge representation, or human-in-the-loop AI.
Experience partnering with enterprise platform and IT delivery organizations.
Experience building reusable frameworks or platform capabilities that other teams customize and extend at scale.
Experience defining clean interfaces between a knowledge / memory substrate and reasoning or agent systems.
Key Relationships
This role is highly collaborative and partners across J&J's technology, data, and scientific organizations:
Head of Generative AI

direct manager; sets organizational direction and priorities.
Generative AI Platform team

owns the R&D agentic platform on which this capability runs.
Generative AI Evaluation & Standards function

provides independent evaluation and per-decision outcome signals.
Johnson & Johnson Technology (JJT)

enterprise technology, infrastructure, and engineering delivery partnership.
Data Strategy & Products (DS&P)

data foundations, governed data, and platform partnership.
Global Regulatory Affairs, Global Development, Therapeutic Areas (TA) and R&D domain teams

scientific and domain experts who customize and apply the capability to their workflows.
External academic and industry partners

collaborations that advance continual learning, knowledge representation, and agentic systems.
Location
This position will be located at one of our U.S. offices: Titusville, NJ; Spring House, PA; Cambridge, MA; or La Jolla, CA. Hybrid work arrangements apply.
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