Technical Team Lead – Applied & Agentic AI Systems

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

We are looking for a Technical Team Lead (Engineering Manager) who exhibits a player-coach and servant leadership mentality to lead a highly autonomous, multidisciplinary team of AI software developers. You will act as the defining engineering voice serving as the bridge between ambitious business goals and the technical reality of building scalable, ethical, and high-impact AI solutions within a highly regulated healthcare environment. You will collaborate with AI Product Managers, consultants, subject matter experts, platforms leadership and engineers, Roche Digital Technology (Roche IT) and business stakeholders to define, build and operate various kinds of AI solutions, driven by generative AI, agentic and classical Machine Learning.

In this role, you must successfully balance being on the manager's- and maker's-schedule. You will likely step away from daily feature coding to guide system architecture and perform rigorous code reviews, while simultaneously providing empathetic people management necessary to cultivate a high-performing engineering squad.

Description of the area

At Roche Digital Technology, we are advancing the boundaries of Applied AI. The Applied AI Engineering Team focuses on architecting, building, and operating high-value AI solutions to solve complex business challenges in healthcare.

In the 2026 tech landscape, we operate in small agile teams (e.g. ~8 members) powered by advanced coding agents (like Claude Code) to develop and ship solutions faster than ever before (through applying Agentic SDLC). This team will not only build end-to-end solutions, but also support "buy and integrate" projects while gathering technical feedback to support the ongoing development of RDT AI Platforms.

Job Responsibilities

Team Management

• Manage multi-disciplinary team members with different skill sets from your own, injecting stability into the squad within a complex organizational environment.
• Cultivate healthy team dynamics, collaboration, psychological safety, and open communication while maintaining a sustainable pace of work.
• Set clear focus and priorities for the team's delivery work, managing sprint goals in partnership with Product Managers while actively removing roadblocks. Engage in continuous product discovery in partnership with Product Managers and UX leads. Be willing and able to step into a Product Owner role when necessary.
• Explain the "WHY" and provide necessary context to your team members.

Capability Development & Resource Management:

• Encourage team members to self-define and drive their career journey and actively enable development opportunities that align with it.
• Manage hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, compensation calibration, succession planning, handling underperformance, and conflict resolution.
• Manage the team's budget, including headcount, software/infrastructure operational costs, and vendor contracts, ensuring financial responsibility.

Technical Direction & Architecture:

• Enable technical decision-making and design of robust, resilient, and highly available systems that integrate generative AI, multi-agent frameworks, RAG/GraphRAG pipelines, state machines, classical ML, and enterprise data ecosystems.
• Establish robust patterns for utilizing LLMs, multimodal foundation models, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers/clients, and vector, graph and relational databases.
• Ensure newly developed AI applications fit within the context of RDT and Business functions, strictly following architectural patterns, standards, and data strategies established across the functions.
• Identify areas of technical debt and perform pragmatic cost/benefit analyses for resolving this debt, ensuring optimal cloud resource and model inference cost-efficiency.
• Establish and enforce rigorous enterprise standards for code, systems development, identity management, and authentication mechanisms across the team.

Agentic SDLC & Code Quality:

• Ensure the team effectively leverages agentic Software Development Lifecycle workflows and tools daily (e.g., Claude Code, autonomous agents) to safely accelerate development and automated testing cycles.
• Act as the technical standards keeper; perform or enable effective, rigorous code reviews for both human-written and AI-generated code to maintain strict enterprise software engineering standards.

Compliance & Regulatory Alignment:

• Oversee compliance-by-design strategies for AI deployments, ensuring engineering deliverables are audit-ready and aligned with GxP compliance and Computerized System Validation (CSV)/Software Assurance (CSA) standards.
• Enforce strict data integrity controls (ALCOA+) to preserve validated infrastructure states.

Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Technology, Science, or a related field.
• Leadership Experience: 3+ years of experience in team leadership and people leadership in an agile product delivery environment, with a proven track record of building and leading high-performing teams.
• Technical Experience: 7+ years of experience working in AI software development teams, with at least 5 years as a hands-on engineer or architect designing cloud-native solutions.
• Regulated Domain Experience: Proven experience operating within a highly regulated environment (pharmaceutical, biotechnology, or clinical healthcare preferred) delivering validated applications.
• Exhibits servant and creative leadership (VACC) behavior.
• Possesses deep active listening and mentoring/coaching skills.
• Demonstrates a leadership presence, strong business acumen, ability to navigate ambiguity, and manage complexity.
• Is a decisive leader, comfortable making decisions in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Brings an enterprise mindset that can break down silos, focusing on delivery through collaboration across organizational boundaries.

Technical Skills

• AI & Orchestration Frameworks: Deep practical expertise in multi-agent system design, state machine logic, and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph.
• Classical Machine Learning: strong hands-on background in building applications driven by classical (pre-generative) Machine Learning and MLOps.
• Core Programming: Production-grade mastery in advanced Python for backend/AI workloads and TypeScript for modern frontend interfaces and generative AI and classical ML UX/UI. Strong foundational understanding of modern full-stack development environments.
• Data & Cloud Platforms: Strong architectural understanding of enterprise data platforms like Snowflake, vector databases (e.g., AWS OpenSearch), and graph databases (e.g., AWS Neptune).
• Cloud Engineering & DevOps: High proficiency overseeing AWS cloud architecture (including serverless workloads, Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, etc.), managing fully automated CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform).
• AI Observability: Experience defining monitoring, logging, and telemetry strategies to track model drift, API/MCP health, resource utilization, and anomaly identification.

Additional Qualifications

• Excels in communicating in English highly effectively and clearly, at the level of: C1+.
• Strong stakeholder management skills to influence non-technical Senior Stakeholders on complex architectural designs.
• Be passionate about AI, staying up-to-date with the latest developments in LLMs, GenAI, agentic, classical ML, cloud computing, and software architectures.
• Be team-oriented, proactive, and collaborative , with the ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Be an excellent problem solver and analytical thinker, detail-oriented and highly organized.
• Be willing to learn and expand their skill set in an environment where roles are fluid and multidisciplinary.

Located in Hyderabad, India, with working hours structured to capture the 'golden hours' of overlap with Central European Time (typically running through the IST evening).

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.