Sr Robotics Systems Engineering Manager

Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson · Pharma · Boston, MA +2

Lead a multidisciplinary systems engineering team and provide technical and organizational leadership for a complex surgical robotic platform across its full product lifecycle. Ensure cohesive system behavior across hardware, software, controls, and clinical workflows, applying rigorous systems engineering principles to a safety-critical medical robotic system. Partner with commercial, clinical, and product management stakeholders to translate clinical user needs, surgeon workflows, and business objectives into well-defined system requirements and successful new product introductions. Ensure customer, clinical, and regulatory expectations are effectively decomposed into robust, traceable system and subsystem solutions. Lead the end-to-end requirements flow-down process, starting with identification and engagement of clinical and business stakeholders, definition of user and system requirements, development of system architecture, and decomposition into clear, testable subsystem requirements. Drive alignment between system architecture decisions and downstream implementation to ensure performance, safety, reliability, and usability objectives are met. Play a critical role in regulatory submissions and product releases by leading the planning, execution, and documentation of design control activities in compliance with FDA regulations, ISO 13485, IEC standards, and other applicable regulatory and quality system requirements. This includes ownership of system-level risk management, requirements traceability, verification strategies, and design reviews. Requires close and continuous collaboration with electrical engineering, software, controls, mechanical engineering, clinical, quality, manufacturing, and verification & validation (V&V) teams. Ensure cross-functional integration, resolve technical trade-offs, and drive system-level decision-making across disciplines to deliver a cohesive, compliant, and high-performing robotic system.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead and develop a multidisciplinary systems engineering team responsible for the definition of system architecture, decomposition of system functionality, and development of clear, testable system‑level and subsystem requirements for a complex surgical robotic platform.
  2. Own the end‑to‑end requirements lifecycle, ensuring seamless flow‑down and traceability from clinical user needs, surgeon workflows, and business objectives through system, subsystem, hardware, and software requirements, and ultimately through verification and validation.
  3. Drive close collaboration across hardware, software, controls, mechanical, clinical, and V&V teams to ensure system requirements are technically sound, fully testable, and aligned with real‑world clinical use cases and robotic performance needs.
  4. Lead system architecture development for robotic systems, ensuring tight integration of electromechanical hardware, embedded and application software, control algorithms, sensing, actuation, and user interaction within a safety‑critical medical device environment.
  5. Lead system‑level risk management activities in accordance with ISO 14971, including hazard analysis, risk control definition, risk verification, and residual risk assessment, with particular focus on robotic behaviors, software contributions to risk, and clinical use scenarios.

Skills

Required

  • Systems engineering principles
  • Robotics
  • Hardware/software integration
  • Requirements management
  • Risk management
  • Regulatory compliance (FDA, ISO 13485, IEC)
  • Team leadership

Nice to have

  • Clinical user needs translation
  • Surgeon workflow analysis
  • Embedded systems
  • Control algorithms

What the JD emphasized

  • safety-critical medical robotic system
  • FDA regulations
  • ISO 13485
  • IEC standards
  • system-level risk management