Post Doc - AI Safety

7555-Janssen Pharmaceutica NV Legal Entity; Geel; Hybride; EUR 52 000 - 75 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Annual bonus

Vacation days

Parental leave

Bereavement leave

Well-being reimbursement

Résumé du poste

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine is recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher, AI Safety, to join the Data, Data Science & AI organization. The role is a two-year fixed-term appointment reporting to the Scientific Fellow, AI Safety, with base options at Beerse, Belgium or other sites in Europe and the UK.

You will lead a focused research program on governance of agentic AI in regulated R&D, ensuring safety by construction.

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, AI/ML, applied mathematics, or closely related field.
• First-author publications or preprints in AI safety/alignment or related areas.
• Hands-on experience with foundation models and agentic AI.
• Strong programming skills and reproducible experiments.

Responsabilités

• Research program: execute an independent agenda on controls, adversarial assurance, or safety-native architecture.
• Design rigorous, reproducible experiments with baselines, ablations, and uncertainty estimates.
• Evaluate pre-training data interventions and post-training methods for safety properties.
• Prototype layered architectures to constrain agent behavior and translate requirements.
• Collaborate with platform engineering to move methods from prototype to GenAI Platform.
• Present work to scientific, engineering, and leadership audiences; represent at conferences.

Connaissances

PhD in CS/AI/Math

First-author publications

AI safety

Foundation models

Agentic AI

Python

ML frameworks

English proficiency

Model evaluation

Formation

PhD in computer science, AI/ML, applied mathematics

Outils

Python

ML frameworks

Description du poste

Job Function

Career Programs

Job Sub Function

Post Doc – Data Analytics & Computational Sciences

Job Category

Career Program

All Job Posting Locations

Beerse, Antwerp, Belgium, Leiden, Netherlands, Limerick, Ireland, Maidenhead, Berkshire, United Kingdom

Job Description

About the Role Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine is recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher, AI Safety to join our Data, Data Science & AI organization. This is a fixed-term research appointment of two years reporting directly to the Scientific Fellow, AI Safety. The role can be based at one of our sites in Belgium, The Netherlands, UK or Ireland Agentic AI is becoming central to pharmaceutical R&D—from discovery and translational science to development and regulatory work—where evidence standards are rigorous and errors can ultimately affect patient safety and outcomes. Our GenAI Platform supports that shift across a rapidly expanding population of autonomous workflows. Safety at this scale cannot be retrofitted through checks written into individual applications; it must be a property of how these systems are built. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, you will lead a focused, publishable research program on how agentic AI in pharmaceutical R&D can be governed through provable controls, continuously tested through adversarial assurance, and made safe by construction. Your research agenda will sit within one or more of the team's three connected mandates: Provable controls. Develop deterministic, explainable controls that persist throughout agentic workflows, and methods to verify that they hold. Adversarial assurance. Advance continuous red‑teaming and evaluation methods that test safeguards against credible failure scenarios and produce defensible evidence. Safety-native architecture. Investigate pre- and post‑training safety alignment and defense‑in‑depth techniques that make agentic AI safe by construction for regulated pharmaceutical R&D.

Key Responsibilities

• Research Program Execute an independent research agenda (agreed with the Scientific Fellow/mentor) on controls, adversarial assurance, or safety-native architecture for agentic AI in regulated scientific settings. Design rigorous, reproducible experiments—including baselines, ablations, and uncertainty estimates—that test whether a safety property genuinely holds. Evaluate pre‑training data interventions and post‑training methods—including supervised fine‑tuning, preference optimization, and safety tuning—for regulated scientific use cases, including whether safety properties persist under domain adaptation. Prototype layered architectures that constrain agent behavior, and translate scientific, quality, privacy, and regulatory requirements into testable system specifications. Work with platform engineering to move validated methods from prototype into the GenAI Platform, with documentation that makes results reproducible and auditable. Present your work to scientific, engineering, and leadership audiences, and represent the team at conferences, workshops, and standards activities.
• What This Role Is Not Not frontier model development. We are not pre‑training foundation models at scale. The research question is how alignment and architecture should be adapted so that the models and platforms available to us are safe for pharmaceutical R&D. Not a guard‑rail‑prompt role. Safety here is architectural and enforcement is deterministic. A system prompt asking a model to behave is not a control. Not research in isolation. Your research questions come from real agentic workflows, and success includes evidence that the methods work on them—not only a publication. Not a production engineering or operations role. You prototype and validate; platform teams own production deployment, on‑call support, and long‑term maintenance.

Key Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, AI/ML, applied mathematics, or a closely related technical field, preferably completed before the start date.
• A record of first-author research, evidenced by peer‑reviewed publications or preprints, in AI safety/alignment, AI/ML for cybersecurity, formal methods, or a closely related area.
• Hands‑on experience with foundation models and agentic AI, such as retrieval‑augmented generation, tool use, planning, or multi‑agent frameworks, and their failure modes.
• Strong programming skills (for example, Python and modern ML frameworks) and experience building reproducible experiments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, with the ability to present technically defensible arguments to scientific and engineering audiences.
• Scientific rigor in characterizing model and agent behavior, including uncertainty, limitations, failure conditions, and the strength of supporting evidence.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with policy engines, authorization languages (for example, OPA/Rego or Cedar), or formal verification tools.
• Experience fine‑tuning or evaluating foundation models for scientific or biomedical domains.
• Exposure to privacy‑preserving ML, data de‑identification, or data provenance, including their limitations.
• Interest in life sciences or another regulated, high‑stakes domain.
• Open‑source contributions to AI safety, evaluation, or security tooling.

Location

• Beerse, Belgium
• Spring House, Pennsylvania, United States
• Raritan, New Jersey, United States

Hybrid work arrangements apply.

Benefits

• an annual bonus with set target (% of pay) depending on pay grade / location, where the actual amount is based on the employees’ and companies’ performance of the previous calendar year, or sales commissions.
• Moreover, we offer vacation days, parental leave for a minimum of 12 weeks, bereavement leave, caregiver leave, volunteer leave, well‑being reimbursement, programs for financial, physical and mental health.
• We also offer service anniversary and recognition awards, and subject to the terms of their respective plans, employees - and in some location’s eligible dependents - can participate in several insurance plans.
• For more information, visit Employee benefits | Supporting well‑being & career growth | Johnson & Johnson Careers.
• *This is for informative purposes only. Amounts and actual benefits may vary by location and are subject to change.

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.

Johnson & Johnson is committed to providing an interview process that is inclusive of our applicants' needs.

If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request an accommodation, please contact us via https://www.jnj.com/contact-us/careers.

At Johnson & Johnson,we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build aworld where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured,where treatments are smarter and less invasive, andsolutions 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/.

At Johnson & Johnson,we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build aworld where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured,where treatments are smarter and less invasive, andsolutions 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/.