Roche · 15 hours ago
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, AI Agents for Science, AI for Drug Discovery
New York City
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior Level
$160K/yr - $297K/yr
4+ years expRoche is a leading company in healthcare innovation, focusing on advancing science and ensuring access to healthcare. They are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join their AI for Drug Discovery group, where the role involves developing and operating foundational platforms for autonomous scientific agents aimed at accelerating drug discovery processes.
BiotechnologyMedical DeviceHealthcarePharmaceuticalHealth CareHealth DiagnosticsOncologyPrecision Medicine
Responsibilities
Design and build the distributed backend infrastructure for multi-agent systems, managing state, orchestration, and execution across our compute clusters
Implement and standardize tool interfaces using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to expose internal scientific packages (chemistry, biology, and informatics tools) as executable actions for models
Engineer robust APIs and event-driven architectures to integrate agent workflows with experimental data pipelines and execution environments
Deploy and scale agentic systems in production using modern cloud-native patterns, ensuring high availability and low-latency access for internal research teams
Optimize system performance, including efficient context management (RAG), caching, and parallel execution of scientific tasks
Drive engineering excellence by defining software standards, leading code reviews, and building reusable Python libraries for the broader team
Collaborate closely with computational scientists and subject matter experts on designing and evaluating targeted agents for drug discovery
Explore frontier research topics related to agentic use in scientific scenarios and publish the observations
Design and perform training and evaluation of the backbone Large Language Models (LLMs) for improved scientific agentic performance
Qualification
Required
Education: BS/MS with 4–7+ years of experience, or PhD with 0–2+ years of relevant industry experience
Agent Systems: Deep experience building and deploying complex LLM-based applications, with a focus on state management, tool execution, and reliable structured outputs
Backend Engineering: Expert proficiency in Python and asynchronous programming (FastAPI, asyncio) with a strong background in distributed systems
Infrastructure: Experience deploying ML systems in containerized environments and managing integrations with vector databases
Technical Leadership: Proven ability to lead the technical delivery of complex components and mentor junior engineers on software best practices
Mission Driven: You are motivated by the goal of improving human health and want your code to directly contribute to the discovery of new medicines
Preferred
Experience working with scientific data structures (e.g., molecular graphs, protein sequences) or cheminformatics tools is a plus, but not required
Familiarity with the scientific software ecosystem (e.g., RDKit, Biopython)
Benefits
A discretionary annual bonus may be available based on individual and Company performance.
This position also qualifies for the benefits detailed at the link provided below.
Company
Roche
Roche is a pharmaceutical and diagnostics company that offers medicines and diagnostic tests for various medical conditions and diseases.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Roche has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (12)
2024 (9)
2023 (6)
2022 (2)
2021 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$7.79BKey Investors
SoftBankSCALE AINovartis
2021-08-04Post Ipo Equity· $5B
2020-12-07IPO
2020-05-06Post Ipo Equity· $0.5M
Leadership Team
Alan Hippe
Member of the Executive Board - Group CFO
Christine Bakan
Global Head and Group Vice President, Computational Science and Informatics R&D
Recent News
2026-02-08
2026-02-07
Company data provided by crunchbase