Technical Innovation Lead

At Roche you can show up as yourself, embraced for the unique qualities you bring. Our culture encourages personal expression, open dialogue, and genuine connections,  where you are valued, accepted and respected for who you are, allowing you to thrive both personally and professionally. This is how we aim to prevent, stop and cure diseases and ensure everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Join Roche, where every voice matters.

The Position

The Opportunity

The Technical Innovation Lead is responsible for developing, mentoring, and scaling a high-performing, multidisciplinary technical team. This role blends people leadership, technical vision, and strategic delivery oversight with operational excellence across the technical solution lifecycle.

Working in close partnership with global PDD sub-function leaders, you will contribute to strategic priorities and turn into high impactful, production-grade tools and systems.

• You translate organizational strategies into executable functional roadmaps, platform designs, and scalable automated workflows

• You define and execute the technical innovation strategy for PDD China, aligning local delivery with global PDD roadmaps

• You oversee the end-to-end development lifecycle of technical solutions—guiding projects from early-stage incubation and prototyping through to robust productization, integration, and adoption

• You champion user-centric design, change management, and continuous process optimization to drive successful technology adoption across study/molecule teams

• You evaluate and optimize performance metrics (e.g., system usage, delivery velocity, quality impact) to inform long-term product decisions and technical roadmap evolution

• You ensure system development adheres to necessary regulatory, data privacy, and compliance frameworks

• You own continuous improvement of internal processes to increase team efficiency, quality, and cross-functional alignment

• You keep abreast of advanced, cutting-edge AI knowledge and guide the applications

• You serve as a key technical partner to cross-functional stakeholders across PD functions and Informatics 

• You represent technical capabilities, platform strategies, and resource requirements in cross-functional governance forums and planning sessions

• You lead a team of data scientists, guiding performance, development, and delivery  across multiple capability areas

• You manage workforce planning, hiring, onboarding, resource allocation, and succession planning aligned with functional priorities

• You drive a high-performing team culture grounded in continuous learning, experimentation, technical excellence and collaboration across domains and geographies

• You support the team development in technical depth, strategic agility, and cross-functional collaboration

Who You Are:

• You hold a Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Biomedical Informatics, Life Sciences, Engineering, or a related field

• You have 12+ years of experience in delivering data science, software engineering, data platform, or clinical data solutions within R&D or highly technical environments, including 3+ years of experience in leadership role (people, project, or product leadership)

• You have demonstrated success leading high-performing technical teams in the development and delivery of scalable platforms or tooling in a scientific or regulated environment

• You have broad expertise spanning modern software architecture, scalable computing environments, platform integration, clinical data workflows and advanced analytics

• You have experience in advanced AI applications (e.g., agentic workflows, LLM enablement, automated trial review, or multimodal data integration)

• You demonstrate capacity for independent thinking and ability to make decisions based upon sound principles

• You exhibit excellent strategic agility including problem-solving and critical thinking skills, and agility that extends beyond technical domain

• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts clearly to senior stakeholders 

• You have strong intercultural awareness and respect for diversity when collaborating across global teams and geographies.

Preferred: 

• Industry experience in biopharma, healthtech, or regulated life sciences R&D environments

• Deep understanding of clinical development data flow and system architecture, and end-to-end product development lifecycle 

• Demonstrated success in prototyping-to-productization pipelines

• Track record of developing organizational capability in data science 

• Familiarity with cloud platforms, agile tooling, and collaborative development workflows

• Proven experience with advanced AI applications (e.g., agentic workflows, LLM enablement, automated trial review, or multimodal data integration)

Who we are

A healthier future drives us to innovate. Together, more than 100’000 employees across the globe are dedicated to advance science, ensuring everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Our efforts result in more than 26 million people treated with our medicines and over 30 billion tests conducted using our Diagnostics products. We empower each other to explore new possibilities, foster creativity, and keep our ambitions high, so we can deliver life-changing healthcare solutions that make a global impact.

Let’s build a healthier future, together.

Roche is an Equal Opportunity Employer.