Head of Engineering - Lab Automation

A healthier future. It’s what drives us to innovate. To continuously advance science and ensure everyone has access to the healthcare they need today and for generations to come. Creating a world where we all have more time with the people we love. That’s what makes us Roche.

Advances in AI, data, and computational sciences are transforming drug discovery and development. Roche’s Research and Early Development organisations at Genentech (gRED) and Pharma (pRED) have demonstrated how these technologies accelerate R&D, leveraging data and novel computational models to drive impact. Seamless data sharing and access to models across gRED and pRED are essential to maximising these opportunities. The new Computational Sciences Center of Excellence (CoE) is a strategic, unified group whose goal is to harness this transformative power of data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist our scientists in both pRED and gRED to deliver more innovative and transformative medicines for patients worldwide.

Within the CoE organisation, the Data and Digital Catalyst organisation drives the modernisation of our computational and data ecosystems and integration of digital technologies across Research and Early Development to enable our stakeholders, power data-driven science and accelerate decision-making.

The Opportunity 

The Head of Engineering - Lab Automation is a well-established, highly credible and innovative leader who will modernize lab automation engineering across Research and Early Development to power our lab in the loop vision and bridge scientific experimentation with our computational and data ecosystems.  We aim to build a modern and scalable approach to run experiments, collect, move, process and analyze large scale datasets from a broad range of scientific modalities and instrumentation across the organization.  This strategic and impact-driven leader will operate at the intersection of visionary leadership, scientific needs, engineering excellence, and hands-on technical implementation.  With deep technical expertise in lab automation and software engineering, you will enable breakthrough research today and drive the adoption of forward-looking, novel and innovative approaches and technologies for tomorrow. In addition to strategic and technical leadership, you will focus on establishing close partnerships with stakeholders and leaders from across the organization as well as vendors to transform our data ecosystem and infrastructure to advance the delivery of more innovative and transformative medicines for patients worldwide.

You will set the vision and build a world-class team of engineers to enable cutting-edge automation capabilities that fuel large-scale experimental execution, data capture, movement, processing, and analysis.  Collaborating closely with computational scientists, research scientists and laboratory managers across modalities and Research and Early Development, this team will design and implement systems and platforms that deliver modern, integrated and performant lab automation solutions. The generated large-scale experimental data will feed our AI models and ultimately revolutionize our drug discovery and development efforts. Your leadership will shape how we generate data at scale, how we embed modern engineering approaches and cutting edge technologies, and how we build modern and robust lab automation platforms to transform how research is conducted.   You will recruit, mentor, and lead a technical team to realise the impact and outcomes of your vision and to shape the data and digital landscape across our global Research and Early Development organisations to accelerate research, drug discovery and development.

You will make pivotal contributions to the future of the CoE and Research and Early Development by:

• Providing strategic and technical leadership for the Lab Automation engineering group within the Computational CoE and as a member of the Data and Digital Catalysts Leadership Team

• Leading the definition and execution of a forward-looking automation engineering strategy to modernize experimental data generation by standardizing and automating scientific workflows across diverse lab instruments and modalities in a scalable, robust and performant manner, and building cloud-native infrastructure that enables high throughput experimentation, real-time data capture, and integration across global research environments  

• Designing and building modular and integrated lab automation platforms and software that connect instruments, control systems, and our data ecosystem via unified orchestration and APIs

• Enable end-to-end automation–from experimental setup to data handoff–while ensuring interoperability with LIMS, ELNs, and AI pipelines<