Business Lead, AI-native Discovery Automation & Robotics

Job Description

Business Lead, AI-native Discovery Automation & Robotics

Takeda is transforming how medicines are discovered by building a new Research engine where AI, advanced data platforms, and laboratory automation are embedded directly into how scientists design and discover molecules, run experiments, and make decisions. Our Labs of Tomorrow vision connects computational science, scientific data, and automated experimental workflows into a closed-loop discovery engine that will enable us to design smarter studies, shorten learning cycles, and deliver clearer evidence earlier in discovery with the ultimate goal of discovering differentiated medicines for patients.

The Business Lead, AI-native Discovery Automation & Robotics is central to realizing this vision. The scientist will be responsible for Takeda's next-generation laboratory orchestration AI-native software product: owning the scientific vision, customer experience, product strategy, roadmap, adoption, and ultimately the value it creates for our drug discovery. The Business Lead will define and answer what the intelligently orchestrated automated laboratory should be in a future where AI agents, predictive models, and scientific data direct experimental execution, and where robotic workflows, sample logistics, manual steps, and the troubleshooting that laboratory work demands are planned and run as one production floor.

Our ambition is for this product to become the environment through which Takeda's laboratories plan, execute, and continuously improve experimental work around the clock.

The Business Lead, AI-native Discovery Automation & Robotics is a foundational leadership role, acting as the owner and of Takeda's Discovery Automation & Robotics product family, an integrated family of capabilities that connects the instrument-level scheduling and control systems already running Takeda's automated work cells into a single operating layer spanning the manual work, sample logistics, handoffs, and exception handling that surround them, with 24/7 laboratory operation as the target state.

The role refines the strategic vision for future-state AI-native Labs of Tomorrow capabilities in the physical laboratory and drives its translation into AI-enabled experimental workflows, product direction, adoption, and measurable scientific and business value by working with both relevant internal and external stakeholders.

The successful candidate will lead this portfolio as a business owner on the side of the internal customer, combining deep laboratory automation and experimental operations expertise with computational, data, and technology fluency to ensure that the products built are science-first, grounded in the physical reality of laboratory work, and capable of sustaining 24/7 laboratory operation with meaningful gains in data quality, throughput, and cycle times.

Your customers will be Takeda's automation engineers, laboratory operations and platform scientists, medicinal chemists, molecule designers, assay designers, biologists running assays at scale, and the scientists whose experiments depend on work being executed reliably overnight. The role carries sufficient technical fluency to provide informed direction on the strategic technology choices underpinning the product family, at the level of intent and trade-off rather than detailed evaluation or execution.

This is a unique opportunity for an exceptional leader who can combine deep understanding of automated laboratory operations with strong computational, data, and technology fluency, and who will ensure that the applications developed are scientifically grounded, technically actionable, adoptable by end users, and aligned with Takeda's business priorities.

This role operates at the program leadership level, collaborating directly with Takeda's “Labs of Tomorrow” leadership team to shape portfolio priorities, resolve strategic tradeoffs, and ensure future-state laboratory orchestration capabilities advance from vision to measurable scientific and business impact. The role provides day-to-day direction to the technical leads and development squads working on the Discovery Automation & Robotics product family, and is interacting closely with the SME leads.

The role will also interface with the other Product Leads to ensure extensibility across the suites of products.

• Own and refine the strategic vision for the orchestration software product suite to enable the future-state Discovery…