PHARMAFull time
Executive Director - Pharma R&D, AI CoE and Data Analytics, India Centre
By Admin · Data Science, Analytics & AI
HYDERABAD (IN)ONSITEPOSTED: 10/12/2026
PHARMAFull time
HIRING ORGANIZATIONROCHEPharmaceuticals and Diagnostics
ROLE OVERVIEW
Roche is hiring an Executive Director to build and lead its Pharma R&D AI Centre of Excellence and Data Analytics function at the India Centre in Hyderabad. The role sets the CoE's operating model and drives industrialisation of Agentic AI across Roche's Pharma R&D workstreams.
ROLE DEFINITION & RESPONSIBILITIES
- •Establish and run the R&D Agentic AI CoE with a hybrid operating model mixing central services (governance, standards, infrastructure) and embedded support, flexing capacity to workflow pod demand
- •Advise workflow teams that own business process redesign, product development, requirements, KPI ownership (cycle time, quality, productivity) and value realisation
- •Drive technology change management and accelerate internal capability maturity through experience-based pairing and knowledge transfer
- •Standardise Verification & Validation frameworks, define the "definition of done", automate traceability matrices, and hold authority for GxP standards and EU AI Act traceability including SRRA and Data Classification Reports
- •Provide foundational architecture and managed sandbox environments for proof-of-science on new AI use cases, oversee AI DevOps prototyping, and advise on PHOps token optimisation and model upgrades
- •Own the Agentic orchestration strategy and AI agent registry, maintaining reusable metadata, agent models and data assets to remove redundant island solutions
- •Lead data interoperability and readiness strategy, including domain-specific knowledge graphs and semantic layers for contextual and explainable AI provenance
- •Recruit and develop AI experts, own AI upskilling and training, foster psychological safety and ownership, and build strategic vendor and technology partner relationships
QUALIFICATIONS & REQUIREMENTS
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Proven ability to operate a decentralised, practitioner-led CoE and evolve enterprise standards from real-world workflow implementation rather than theoretical frameworks
- Proven ability to partner with, lead and influence senior leaders and to enable functionally aligned workflow teams
- Senior technical leadership across platform teams, ensuring architectural coherence for advanced data pipelines and the semantic layers required for autonomous agent integration
- Demonstrated track record of managing mission-critical systems with a first-time-right mentality, and strategic management of budget, portfolio performance and post-production support
- Experience leading a significantly scaling, cross-functional organisation of prompt engineers, data scientists, AI researchers and GxP-compliance specialists in a hub-and-spoke network, initially 2-3 people leaders and more than 20 individual contributors
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- •Understanding of Pharma R&D processes and global regulatory standards (e.g., GxP, EU AI Act) and digital audit integrity
REQUIRED VERIFIED SKILLS
Agentic AI
LLM architectures
Prompt engineering
Data science
AI research
Data interoperability
Knowledge graphs
Semantic layers
AI DevOps
Verification & Validation (V&V)
GxP
EU AI Act traceability
System Risk Assessments (SRRA)
Data classification
Vendor and technology partner management
COMPENSATION & REWARDS
Salary: Competitive / Disclosed upon candidate shortlisting
ORGANIZATION CONTEXT & CULTURE
Roche is a global healthcare company whose more than 100,000 employees work to advance science and widen access to healthcare. Its medicines treat over 26 million people, and its Diagnostics products are used in more than 30 billion tests.
INDUSTRY: Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics
APPLICATION ADVISORY
Highlight any experience you have standing up or running a practitioner-led AI centre of excellence inside a regulated pharma R&D setting, since the posting stresses evolving standards from real workflow implementation. Give concrete examples of influencing senior leaders, owning GxP and EU AI Act traceability work, and leading a hub-and-spoke team of prompt engineers, data scientists, AI researchers and GxP-compliance specialists. Mention platform work on advanced data pipelines such as Snowflake and AWS Bedrock, plus knowledge graphs and semantic layers, as these are named in the posting.
RECOMMENDED TRAINING
1/5
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