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 e…