Senior Manager, External Innovation and Partnerships

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

As guided by Our Credo, Johnson & Johnson is responsible to our employees who work with us throughout the world.  We provide an inclusive work environment where each person is considered as an individual.  At Johnson & Johnson, we respect the diversity and dignity of our employees and recognize their merit.

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We are searching for the best talent for a Senior Manager, External Innovation and Partnerships. The preferred location is Cambridge, MA. Locations of New Brunswick, NJ or San Francisco, CA may be an option.

The Technology Strategy & External Innovation organization drives future-focused technology strategy, identifies innovation opportunities, and shapes technology partnerships across Innovative Medicine, MedTech, and corporate functions. 

As Senior Manager, External Innovation & Technology Partnerships, you will identify, evaluate, and advance high-potential technology companies and partners across deep tech and enterprise technology domains—including AI, enterprise software, data infrastructure, security, cloud/edge technologies, advanced compute, and quantum computing. 

You will build clear investment and partnering theses around emerging technology trends, translate technical signals into actionable opportunity areas, and deliver a qualified pipeline of external partners that can address J&J’s critical enterprise priorities. 

This role is ideal for a technically fluent ecosystem builder who can move between technology understanding, partner discovery, strategic thesis development, and hands-on execution—while helping shape partner roadmaps toward meaningful enterprise impact. 

Key Responsibilities 

Technology Thesis Development & Ecosystem Insight 

• Develop clear theses on emerging technology trends, ecosystems, and capability gaps that matter to J&J’s enterprise technology agenda. 

• Translate technical, market, and ecosystem signals into actionable implications for enterprise architecture, product roadmaps, operating models, and strategic partnerships. 

• Assess companies, technologies, and technical differentiation with enough depth to separate durable capability from hype. 

• Lead work across a cross-functional team to gather input and consensus on strategic insights and outcomes.  

• Shape outcomes in a matrixed operating environment harnessing insights from business groups, technology and external ecosystem partners 

Sourcing & External Engagement Framework  

• Build, codify, and maintain a repeatable sourcing and external engagement approach for deep tech, enterprise software, AI, infrastructure, security, and other priority technology domains. 

• Define sourcing hypotheses, technical evaluation criteria, search strategies, and workflows that move opportunities from discovery to assessment, engagement, pilot design, and progression. 

• Create internal guidance, playbooks, templates, governance, and decision-gate mechanisms for evaluating external partners. 

• Map and actively cultivate the external ecosystem across startups, enterprise vendors, venture networks, research labs, academia, and strategic technology partners. 

• Engage promising companies early, build trusted relationships, and help shape partner roadmaps toward J&J-relevant enterprise use cases. 

Opportunity Assessments, Reporting & Technology Leadership Support 

• Own partnering across senior leaders and engineers across J&J Technology to assess opportunities and own the analysis, synthesis, and communication of opportunity assessments, feasibility evaluations, strategic fit, and expected outcomes for technology leadership. 

• Build crisp, executive-ready presentations articulating: 

• technology impact on business and IT outcomes 

• value cases and adoption rationale 

• risks, integration considerations, and time-to-value 

• Advocate for bold, thesis-driven opportunities by combining thoughtful analysis, executive-ready communication, empathy for enterprise readiness, and constructive challenge with business and technology stakeholders. 

• Develop a consistent methodology for opportunity scoring and measuring impact from programs.  

Communication & Influence 

• Develop clear, succinct executive-level narratives and visual communication that articulate technology strategies and their impact on enterprise IT outcomes. 

• Present recommendations to senior leaders with confidence, clarity, and strong storytelling. 

• Bring structure, operational discipline, and momentum to complex, ambiguous initiatives. 

Required Qualifications 

• 4–6+ years in enterprise technology, technical strategy, product, engineering-adjacent roles, venture/startup ecosystem engagement, external innovation, or related fields. 

• Strong familiarity with enterprise software, AI/ML, data platforms, security, cloud infrastructure, advanced compute, or other deep tech domains relevant to large-scale enterprise environments. 

• Demonstrated ability to build a thesis on an emerging technology trend, define where value may emerge, and translate that thesis into a focused sourcing and partner pipeline. 

• Proven experience communicating to executive audiences and building compelling presentations that influence decisions. 

• Ability to evaluate technical differentiation, implementation feasibility, integration considerations, and likely enterprise impact in partnership opportunities. 

• Experience building relationships across startups, venture-backed companies, enterprise vendors, research organizations, and internal technical stakeholders. 

• Strong relationship-building skills and ability to influence across technical and business teams. 

• Comfort working with technical teams and translating between engineering, architecture, product, business, and executive audiences. 

• Self-starter with strong ownership, urgency, and comfort operating in ambiguity. 

• Genuine passion for healthcare and the potential of technology to improve outcomes. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Technical, engineering, computer science, product, or enterprise architecture background strongly preferred. 

• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, applied sciences, or a related technical field a plus. 

• Experience navigating deep tech or enterprise technology ecosystems and identifying early companies with potential to influence enterprise capabilities or future technology roadmaps. 

• Experience in executive communication and presenting strategic opportunities to leadership 

• Familiarity with partner evaluation, RFI/RFP processes, due diligence, or technology pilot design. 

• Exposure to AI engineering, MLOps, LLMOps, model lifecycle tooling, or production deployment patterns for AI-enabled products is a plus. 

• Familiarity with agentic AI platforms, orchestration patterns, retrieval, tool use, human review workflows, or reusable AI development accelerators is helpful. 

• Knowledge of knowledge graphs, semantic layers, ontologies, vector databases, embedding pipelines, or context engineering patterns is beneficial. 

• Awareness of AI evaluation, scorecards, observability, model monitoring, drift detection, responsible AI controls, or value measurement approaches is a plus. 

• Practical understanding of AI cost drivers, tokenomics, model selection tradeoffs, inference costs, caching, routing, or cloud/GPU cost management would be valuable. 

• Familiarity with AI security, red-teaming, model risk, prompt injection, data leakage, third-party model governance, licensing, SLAs, or enterprise GenAI governance is helpful. 

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. 

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, external applicants please contact us via https://www.jnj.com/contact-us/careers , internal employees contact AskGS to be directed to your accommodation resource.

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