Principal / Senior Principal Software Engineer
About this opportunity
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
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 organizations 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 Computational Sciences Center of Excellence (CS CoE) is a strategic, unified group whose goal is to harness the transformative power of data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist our scientists in both pRED and gRED to deliver more innovative and life-changing medicines for patients worldwide.
Within the CS CoE organisation, the Data and Digital Catalyst (DDC) organization leads the modernization of our computational and data ecosystems by integrating digital technologies across Research and Early Development to empower stakeholders, advance data-driven science and accelerate decision-making.
The Solutions team within the DDC Organization develops modernized and interconnected computational and data ecosystems. The Data Ecosystem is foundational to building solutions that accelerate the work done by our Computational and Bench Scientists and enable ML/AI tool creation and adoption. Our team specializes in building Data Pipelines and Applications for data acquisition, collection, storage, transformation, linkage and sharing.
Join our Data and Digital Catalyst team as a Software Engineer, where you will develop the modernized and interconnected computational and data ecosystems that are foundational to our research. You'll build robust and scalable systems that unlock the potential of our diverse scientific data, directly accelerating the discovery and development of life-changing treatments for patients. This is a unique opportunity to empower our scientists and advance data-driven science through innovative technology.
The Opportunity
Build and enhance a modern, scalable ecosystem of applications and tools to capture, move, and prepare scientific data for analysis.
Design and deliver complex, user-friendly data applications and pipelines that integrate diverse data sets across key scientific domains.
Leverage standard patterns like microservices and event-driven architecture to improve our data workflows and application ecosystem.
Champion technical excellence by ensuring our solutions are innovative, best-in-class, and seamlessly integrated.
Integrate diverse data sets to power Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Natural Language Search capabilities.
Collaborate directly with computational and research scientists to understand their challenges and translate them into effective technology solutions.
Provide technical leadership on ongoing initiatives and identify new opportunities to build common, reusable solutions.
Mentor junior developers, fostering their professional growth and upholding high engineering standards.
Who You Are
We are looking for a passionate and collaborative software engineer with a talent for building scalable, reliable platforms. You thrive on engaging with scientific partners to solve complex challenges and are dedicated to engineering best practices.
A BS or MS degree in Computer Science or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience and 8-10+ years of professional experience in full-stack software and data engineering, with strong skills in backend (e.g., Python , Java) and frontend (e.g., React, Vue) development
Deep experience with modern data engineering, including databases (SQL /NoSQL), data engineering ( ETL /ELT), and APIs ( REST, GraphQL)
Proven experience developing and deploying applications on cloud-native architectures, preferably AWS
Experience in setting up SDLC best practices for the team including versioning, testing, observability, CI/CD, etc.
Exceptional abilities to architect scalable solutions in complex environment with multiple existing system integrations
Outstanding communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences
Preferably experience working in pharmaceutical or a related domain and in setting best-practices for agentic coding producing maintainable code
The Global Grade for this role can be: SE7 or SE8 to align with Principal / Sr. Principal Engineer
#ComputationCoE
#tech4lifeComputationalSciences
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.
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Information Technology role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 367 comparable Principal Information Technology roles across 36 biopharma companies.
Salary context
46 of 367 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 367 comparable roles
+ 14 more countries
Seniority mix
367 of 367 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
1 of 367 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.