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.

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The Position

Job description

We are looking for a Technical Team Lead (Tech Lead Manager) who exhibits a player-coach 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.

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

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 and to solve complex business challenges in healthcare.

In the 2026 tech landscape, we operate in small agile teams (e.g., ~6 members) powered by advanced coding agents (like Claude Code) to develop and ship solutions faster than ever before (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

Technical Direction & Architecture:

• Guide technical decision making and architect robust systems that integrate generative AI, multi-agent workflows, and enterprise data.
• Explain the “WHY” and provide necessary context to your engineers.
• Identify areas of technical debt and perform pragmatic cost/benefit analyses for resolving this debt.
• Help to establish and enforce standards for code and systems development across the team.

Agentic SDLC & Code Quality:

• Act as the primary technical gatekeeper; while you are willing to step away from day-to-day code development, you are fully willing to perform effective code reviews.
• Ensure the team effectively leverages AI coding assistants daily to accelerate development while maintaining strict enterprise software engineering standards for both human-written and AI-generated code.

Team Health & Psychological Safety:

• Set clear focus and priorities for the team’s delivery work and actively remove impediments and roadblocks to progress.
• Cultivate healthy team dynamics and collaboration, ensuring psychological safety and open communication.
• Maintain a sustainable pace of work for the team, balancing delivery goals with team well-being.
• Manage team members with different skill sets from your own , injecting stability into the team in a complex organizational environment.

Capability Development & Resource Management:

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

Qualifications

• Exhibits servant and creative leadership (VACC) behavior.
• Possesses deep active listening and mentoring 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.

Education / Experience

• Bachelor or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Technology, Science, Business or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience in product/service leadership and people leadership, or a similar role, with a proven track record of building and leading high performing teams.
• 7+ years of e…