Executive Director - Pharma R&D, AI CoE and Data Analytics, India Centre

Executive Director - Pharma R&D, AI CoE and Data Analytics, India Centre

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

About Roche Digital Technology (RDT) Roche Digital Technology (RDT) is where innovation meets purpose. As a global team at the heart of Roche, we are a community of business-minded technologists committed to helping shape tomorrow’s digital future of healthcare. Our mission is to power Roche through cutting-edge digital technologies, harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence, data, and scalable tech innovations. Driven by purpose and passion, we’re building a future where digital is a core strength across all of Roche, enabling smarter ways of working, unlocking human potential, and driving breakthroughs that truly matter for millions of patients around the world.

Role Summary 

As the Head of the RDT Pharma R&D AI Center of Excellence (CoE) and Data Analytics, you assume a critical executive leadership role, serving as a vital AI thought leader and Strategic Partner to the RDT Pharma R&D Leadership Team and Business teams.

Rather than acting as a traditional "ivory tower" service provider, you will proactively shape the overall Pharma R&D AI and data strategy by delivering centralized core services alongside embedded, hands-on expert support. You are responsible for setting up the Hyderabad CoE, establishing the service offerings that will empower workflow teams to deliver compliant, zero-friction digital solutions and ensuring the scalable industrialization of Agentic AI capabilities Across the Pharma R&D domain.

Key Accountabilities

• CoE Strategy & Flexible Service Operationalization: Lead the establishment and operation of the R&D Agentic AI CoE. You will define and shape a flexible, hybrid operating model that balances centralized core services (such as governance, standards and infrastructure) with embedded support. You will have the flexibility to dial the capacity of this model up or down based on the specific demands of the workflow pods, ensuring your team provides both foundational guidance and active, hands-on collaboration exactly where it is needed most.

• Strategic Partnership & Capability Enablement: Act as an advisory partner to the workflow teams who retain ultimate responsibility for business process redesign, product development, business and technical requirements, KPI ownership (Cycle Time, Quality, Productivity) and value realization. Your CoE will drive technological change management and accelerate internal capability maturity through experience based pairing and knowledge transfer.

• Governance, Verification & Validation (V&V) and Quality Standards: Standardize Verification & Validation (V&V) frameworks, define the "definition of done" and automate traceability matrices to ensure predictability across high-risk use cases. Act as the primary authority for maintaining strict GxP standards and EU AI Act traceability integrating System Risk Assessments (SRRA) and Data Classification Reports into CoE templates.

• Core Platforms & Rapid Innovation: Provide foundational architecture and managed "sandbox" environments to accelerate the "proof of science" for new AI use cases. Oversee AI DevOps to rapidly prototype and validate CoE frameworks against real world needs. Act as an advisor on PHOps (token optimization for R&D workflows) and provide essential model upgrade guidance for the Domain.

• Agent Marketplace & Asset Management: Own and develop the integrated Agentic orchestration strategy, and AI agent registry. You will be responsible for synthesizing insights from workflow teams to maintain reusable metadata, agent models and data assets, ensuring cross-functional synergies and eliminating redundant "island solutions".

• Data Interoperability & Responsible AI: Drive the strategy for data interoperability and data readiness, guiding the construction of domain-specific knowledge graphs and semantic layers necessary to provide agents with contextual horizons and explainable AI provenance.

• Talent, Community and Vendor Strategy: Recruit a top-tier team of AI experts and leaders. Own AI talent upskilling and training. Foster a culture defined by psychological safety and a strong sense of ownership. Develop strategic relationships with external vendors and technology partners to ensure the CoE remains at the forefront of industry capabilities.

Key Leadership Competencies and Skills

• CoE & Service Leadership: Proven ability to operate a decentralized, practitioner-led CoE. Must excel at evolving enterprise standards based on real-world workflow implementation rather than theoretical frameworks.

• Strategic Thought Leadership & Influence: Proven ability to partner with, lead and influence senior leaders. Must be able to empower functionally aligned workflow teams and position the CoE as a strategic enabler rather than an execution bottleneck.

• Domain Expertise & Risk Mastery: Understanding of Pharma R&D processes and global regulatory standards (e.g., GxP, EU AI Act) & digital audit integrity are preferred.

• Technical Architecture Leadership: Serves as the senior technical leader across platform teams, ensuring architectural coherence for advanced data pipelines (e.g., Snowflake, AWS Bedrock) and the semantic layers required for autonomous agent integration.

• Operational Excellence & Financial Acumen: Demonstrated track record of successfully managing mission-critical systems with a "first time right" mentality. Strategically manages budget, portfolio performance and post-production support strategies.

Team Size & Scope

Lead a significantly scaling, cross-functional organization of experts, including prompt engineers, data scientists, AI researchers, and GxP-compliance specialists across a complex "hub-and-spoke" innovation network. You will initially lead a team of 2-3 people leaders and 20+ individual contributors. You will establish the Hyderabad RDT Pharma R&D CoE as the global nerve center for Agentic AI, responsible for applying the foundational LLM architectures and driving the end-to-end industrialization of AI across Discovery, Preclinical, Clinical, Safety, Medical Affairs and Regulatory workstreams. Beyond technical delivery, your mandate is to institutionalize an "AI-first" R&D culture and influence C-suite strategy to drastically accelerate drug development timelines and increase the global probability of success. By fostering cross-site synergies across all Roche R&D hubs and establishing elite partnerships with local AI ecosystems, you will ensure we are at the frontier of pharmaceutical innovation. 

 

 

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.

Experience Level

Executive Level