Product Line Lead - AI Platforms and Solutions

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

Always innovating, we bring together dedicated people and diverse perspectives from across our global network, empowering each other to keep breaking new ground.

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced IT leader for our AI-focused product line within the IT domain of Analytics Foundational Platforms. The ideal candidate will have a strong technical understanding of AI and its technical foundation, as well as the ability to partner with and create alignment with stakeholders. The position will lead 3-4 Product Managers driving execution of our AI-related capabilities from the product line within the broader AI strategy and portfolio. 

The Opportunity:

• Provide leadership towards implementation of enterprise-scale AI solutions, with emphasis on AI platform capabilities enabling an AI empowered workforce related to AI solutions reshaping functional and cross functional processes.

• Focus on responsible AI practices, MLOps, and sustainable AI development.

• A solid understanding of industry technology advances and how to optimize its implementation in the Roche platform context and broader ecosystem. 

• Stakeholder Management: Build and maintain strong relationships with IT and business leaders across all levels. Engage stakeholders to understand their needs, manage expectations, and ensure alignment of AI initiatives with business goals across the full value chain.

• Team Leadership: Recruit, mentor, and lead a team of AI professionals. Foster a collaborative, innovative, and inclusive team environment while providing clear direction and performance feedback.

• Build and lead high-performing AI teams, balancing technical excellence with business acumen while fostering a culture of innovation, continuous learning, and responsible AI development

• Develop talent through mentoring and creating growth opportunities

• Portfolio and Financial Management: Manage budgets, forecast financial needs, and oversee the successful delivery of AI projects. Ensure alignment with the organization’s strategic goals and maintain a balanced project portfolio understanding and aligning dependencies to other portfolios. 

• Agile Delivery: Drive the execution of AI projects using agile methodologies. Ensure timely delivery of high-quality solutions by optimizing processes and facilitating continuous improvement in an agile setting.

• It is a plus if the candidate has good technical acumen and can lead the development and implementation of AI solutions by leveraging deep technical knowledge in artificial intelligence and its foundational technologies.

AI Technical Foundation

• Expertise in architecting and implementing large-scale AI systems, including foundation models. 

• Track record of implementing cutting-edge techniques in areas such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, and model distillation

• Good understanding of cloud-native architectures for AI/ML workloads across major platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Strong focus on responsible AI development, including bias detection and mitigation

• Track record of building maintainable, production-grade platforms, preferable AI systems

Stakeholder Management:

• Build relationships with IT and business leaders, align AI initiatives with business goals

• Translate complex AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders

• Influence senior leadership and manage conflicts.

Team Leadership:

• Direct leadership is limited to the direct reports of 3-4 product managers in the area of AI. This role will however oversee and be accountable for the outcomes of the agile teams supporting the area. 

• Experience in leading global teams / virtual

• People leadership, mentoring and coaching experience is required. 

Portfolio and Financial Management:

• Manage budgets and oversee AI project delivery aligned with strategic goals.

• Maintain a balanced project portfolio.

Agile Delivery:

• Execute AI projects using agile methodologies ensuring timely, high-quality solutions.

• Facilitate process optimization and continuous improvement.

• Manage project lifecycles, meeting deadlines, and ensuring quality delivery.

Portfolio and Finance Management:

• Ensure AI initiatives deliver measurable outcomes.

• Plan and manage budgets, conduct cost-benefit analyses.

Who you are:

• 10+ years in technology leadership roles with a minimum Bachelors Degree or equivalent.

• Strong experience leading AI platform development at enterprise level.

• Experience working in a platform delivery organization, and an understanding of key concepts to enable technology platform adoption

• Understanding of agile and leading agile across diverse teams

• Good overall understanding of AI technologies, deep learning, and MLOps.

• Experience in life sciences, pharmaceutical, or regulated industries.

• International team leadership experience.

Relocation benefits are not available for this job posting.

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 Pharma Canada has its office in Mississauga, Ontario and employs over 850 employees. The Mississauga facility is bright, vibrant, fosters collaboration and teamwork, and is reflective of Roche's truly innovative culture.