Senior Principal Engineer, Innovation Lab (Remote)

Stryker; Mahwah (NJ); On-site; USD 179,000 - 299,000; Full time

Job summary

Stryker is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to lead as the Enterprise Digital Technology Innovation Lab's senior technical authority in Mahwah, NJ. You will translate business problems into prototypes, pilots, and production-ready solutions, guiding multiple innovation initiatives across the enterprise.

You will provide technical leadership and architecture across ED&T, cybersecurity, data, and business teams, mentoring engineers and accelerating experimentation to reduce time from idea to

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree preferred for leadership roles.
• 10+ years delivering complex software with senior technical leadership.
• 7+ years deep full-stack engineering across front-end, back-end, cloud, and DevOps.
• 5+ years architecting scalable, secure cloud-native systems.
• 3+ years recent applied AI/ML or generative AI experience.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and architecture direction for Innovation Lab initiatives.
• Design, build, review full stack software solutions and AI-enabled apps.
• Prototype concepts rapidly and validate with stakeholders.
• Establish engineering standards and governance for the lab.
• Partner across ED&T, cybersecurity, data, and business teams to accelerate innovation.
• Mentor engineers and grow the lab's long-term capabilities.
• Evaluate emerging technologies for applicability to Stryker.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

AI/ML experience

Cloud architecture

Security & privacy

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

AWS

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

What you will do

As our Senior Principal Engineer, you will serve as the Enterprise Digital Technology Innovation Lab's lead software engineer and technical authority. You will be responsible for translating business problems and emerging opportunities into working prototypes, proofs of concept, pilots, and in some case even production ready solutions. You will be the senior/most technical resource within the Innovation Lab and will lead the technical delivery of multiple innovation initiatives across the enterprise. Additionally, the focus will be on accelerating experimentation, reducing time from idea to proof of value, and helping transition successful solutions into broader delivery teams when appropriate.

• Providing technical leadership and architecture direction for Innovation Lab initiatives
• Designing, building, and reviewing full stack software solutions and AI enabled applications
• Rapidly prototyping new concepts and validating ideas with business stakeholders
• Establishing engineering standards, development practices, and technical governance for the lab
• Partnering across ED&T, cybersecurity, architecture, data, and business teams to accelerate innovation efforts
• Mentoring engineers and helping build the lab's long-term technical capabilities
• Evaluating emerging technologies and determining their applicability to Stryker

What you need

Required

• A Bachelor's degree is needed for this position.
• 10+ years of progressive professional software engineering experience, with a proven record of hands‑on software delivery, senior technical leadership, and meaningful impact across complex software systems, products, platforms, or enterprise technology environments.
• 8+ years of senior technical leadership experience as a Chief Engineer, Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Software Director, Startup CTO, Founding Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leader.
• 7+ years of deep full-stack engineering experience across modern front-end, back-end, cloud, API, database, integration, and DevOps technologies. The candidate must have hands‑on mastery of both front-end and back-end systems and be able to own features end-to-end, review code, make architecture decisions, and set the engineering quality bar for the team.
• 5+ years of experience architecting scalable, secure, cloud-native, enterprise‑grade systems, including distributed systems, data‑intensive applications, APIs, integrations, cloud services, and modern software platforms.
• 3+ years of recent applied AI, machine learning, or generative AI experience, including hands‑on experience building AI‑enabled applications, prototypes, automations, agents, or internal tools.

Preferred

• Strong hands‑on experience with modern software technologies such as TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Python, Django, .NET, Java, Go, Rust, SQL, NoSQL, REST APIs, GraphQL, and event‑driven architectures.
• Strong cloud‑native and DevOps experience, including AWS and/or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, serverless architectures, microservices, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code, secure deployment practices, and modern DevSecOps principles.
• Experience building AI‑enabled solutions using large language models, retrieval‑augmented generation, vector databases, embeddings, prompt engineering, AI agents, model evaluation, workflow orchestration, semantic search, or AI‑assisted development tools.
• Fluency with AI‑native engineering practices, including the effective use of tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar AI coding assistants to accelerate software delivery while maintaining engineering discipline.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous business problems from concept to working software quickly, especially in prototype‑driven, startup‑style, innovation lab, advanced engineering, or rapid delivery environments.
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity, privacy, data governance, identity and access management, secure architecture, responsible AI, and enterprise software risk management.
• Experience integrating with enterprise systems, internal data platforms, APIs, identity providers, business applications, and data sources while navigating access, security, privacy, governance, and compliance constraints.
• Experience in medical technology, healthcare, life sciences, regulated software, digital health, sales enablement, field service, hospital operations, or enterprise healthcare systems.
• Prior experience in medtech, healthtech, financial services, aerospace, defense, or another regulated industry where security, privacy, quality, auditability, and compliance are critical.
• Familiarity with regulated software practices, including quality management systems, design controls, risk management, validation, auditability, traceability, and healthcare data privacy.
• Experience building or leading innovation labs, digital factories, rapid prototyping teams, advanced engineering groups, startup studios, internal product incubation teams, or enterprise AI teams.
• Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Snowflake, Databricks, ERP systems, CRM systems, identity platforms, data warehouses, and business intelligence tools.
• Experience building software for sales representatives, commercial teams, internal operations, customer support, field service, business unit leaders, or enterprise IT organizations.
• Experience with product discovery, design thinking, lean experimentation, customer research, user experience design, and prototype validation.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Biomedical Engineering, or a related technical field preferred.

United States of America Pay Ranges

• USN: $155,900 - $259,700 USD Annual
• US5: $163,700 - $272,700 USD Annual
• US10: $171,500 - $285,700 USD Annual
• US15: $179,300 - $298,700 USD Annual
• US20: $187,100 - $311,600 USD Annual
• US30: $202,700 - $337,600 USD Annual

View the U.S. work location and transparency guide to find the pay range for your location.

Health benefits include: Medical and prescription drug insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, critical illness insurance, accident insurance, hospital indemnity insurance, personalized healthcare support, wellbeing program and tobacco cessation program. Financial benefits include: Health Savings Account (HSA), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), 401(k) plan, Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP), basic life and AD&D insurance, and short-term disability insurance. Stryker offers innovative products and services in MedSurg, Neurotechnology, Orthopaedics and Spine that help improve patient and healthcare outcomes. Alongside its customers around the world, Stryker impacts more than 150 million patients annually. Depending on customer requirements employees and new hires in sales and field roles that require access to customer accounts as a function of the job may be required to obtain various vaccinations as an essential function of their role.