Team Lead - Site Reliability Engineering

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

Team Lead Engineer SRE Clusters - Digital Operations and Reliability

As Team Lead (Senior Engineering Manager) for SRE in Digital Operations and Reliability (DOR)you will ensure and support the delivery as an entrepreneurial leader, setting focus, removingimpediments, managing stakeholders, and creating efficiencies in collaboration wherever possible.

You are an experienced and entrepreneurial SRE Technical Lead who drives the strategic development and delivery of our global Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) platform and operating model. This is a critical leadership role for a technical driver, who is passionate about creating immense value, pushing technical boundaries, and building resilient, scalable systems from the ground up - and mentor the talent needed to get us there.

You will develop the capabilities of your team members to align with the function’s vision and will encourage your team to self-define their career journey and seek ways to enable development opportunities in the direction of the journey. You will support them in removing roadblocks and by setting focus on their performance management, and make sure to develop your team with the right skills, healthy dynamics, and a sustainable pace.

Description of the Area

• The Digital Operations and Reliability function ensures the proactive management and maintenance of the optimal performance, reliability, and availability of all RDT enterprise-wide digital platforms and Infrastructure, minimizing disruption to business processes across the value chain, and guaranteeing compliance.

• As the SRE Technical Lead, you will be instrumental in defining, building, and scaling our SRE capabilities and platform globally. You are responsible for the holistic maturation of the SRE platform and tooling infrastructure, while simultaneously establishing a technical strategy that aligns with broader organizational product goals.

• This role mandates the rigorous enforcement of operational standards-such as error budgets and standardized service models-coupled with the strategic deployment of AI-driven operations and automation to maximize system reliability and scalability. Furthermore, you will function as a central subject matter expert, bridging cross-functional silos through partnership with key business stakeholders while actively accelerating organizational growth by identifying, hiring, and mentoring high-potential talent to ensure a sustainable, high-performing engineering culture.

• This team plays a key part within DOR as an enabler to champion AI Operations and drive the adoption of self service operational excellence which enables a shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive risk identification and planning via the building of a shared SRE Center of Excellence .

Job Responsibilities

Team Member Capability and Career Development

• Proactively identifies and develops future-focused engineering team capabilities, aligning with long-term strategic goals.

• Mentors team members on long-term career paths, creating new opportunities and roles within the organization to support their growth.

• Addresses and helps resolve complex, systemic roadblocks that impact multiple development teams, and coaches other managers on effective performance management.

• Oversees the technical and soft skill development, ensuring a balanced and high-performing talent portfolio.

Team Health and Sustainability

• Establishes and monitors metrics for team health and sustainability across several development teams, implementing strategies to ensure long-term balance - including but not limited to SRE concepts such as “toil reduction”.

• Designs and implements initiatives to improve collaboration and psychological safety across multiple related development teams or a whole product area - including but not limited to SRE concepts such as fostering a “blameless culture”.

• Proactively identifies and resolves systemic impediments that affect multiple development teams, improving the overall work environment.

• Manages the talent composition for own and related teams, planning for future needs and ensuring a healthy pipeline of skills.

Product and Service Delivery Leadership

• Responsible for co-creating the long-term technical vision and strategy for a product portfolio, partnering with Product Managers and Leaders who are overall responsible for the roadmaps.

• Accountable for the overall delivery performance and successful shipment of features across a product, holding teams accountable for their results.

• Manages technical and delivery priorities and dependencies across a portfolio of products or services, ensuring alignment with broader business objectives.

• Resolves complex, cross-functional impediments that block progress for multiple development teams or entire groups of development teams (e.g. agile release trains or program teams).

• Manages relationships with senior-level stakeholders across multiple product areas, negotiating technical and delivery priorities.

• Drives initiatives to improve engineering processes and collaboration models across a whole product group or department.

Performance & Optimization

• Defines and analyzes success metrics, identifying cross-team technical and delivery optimization opportunities and trends.

• Presents technical and delivery insights and optimization strategies to senior leadership, influencing decision-making and investment for a product portfolio.

• Leads significant process re-engineering efforts that span multiple development teams or multiple groups of development teams to create step-change improvements in performance.

Financial & Resource Mgmt.

• Supports the development of business cases for large initiatives or new product lines, working with product and finance partners to justify investment.

• Manages resource allocation across multiple projects, making trade-offs to optimize for portfolio-level goals and strategic priorities.

• Manages the team's budget, including headcount, operational costs, and vendor contracts, ensuring financial responsibility.

Qualifications

Experience

• 10+ years of experience in people leadership, product/service management, program management, or a similar role, with a proven track record of building high-performing teams

• 2+ years of experience in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, or regulated healthcare technology industry

Technical & Business Skills

• Expertise in Core SRE practices including SLAs/SLOs/SLIs, Error Budget policies, Chaos Engineering, and Fullstack Observability.

• Understanding of software development and/or service delivery methodologies

• Understanding of solution, information, and process architecture, with particular emphasis on Event Intelligence, Self-healing, and Automation technologies.

• Ability to create clarity about outcomes generated by teams

• Exhibits a lean & agile mindset

Leadership Skills

• Exhibits servant and creative leadership (VACC) behavior

• Demonstrated experience building high-performing teams

• Have a keen IT market focus: you are passionate about major trends for the specific discipline

• Demonstrates an executive presence, strong business acumen, ability to navigate ambiguity, and manages complexity

• Manages risks progressively and in a way that leads to opportunity

• An enterprise mindset that can break down silos. Focus on delivery through collaboration and bringing people together to work towards the same purpose across organizational boundaries.

• Ability to empower teams and individuals to act autonomously and hold them accountable.

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.