Principal Engineer II, Fluidic Systems Integration, Research & Early Development

Overview

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. We are committed to preventing, stopping and curing diseases and ensuring everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Join Roche, where every voice matters.

The Position: A healthier future drives us to innovate and ensure everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. We aim to create a world where we all have more time with the people we love.

At Roche, we are working to make next-generation sequencing simple and accessible for routine use. By accelerating clinical research, streamlining workflows, and expanding assay menus, we broaden access to genomic data and reduce adoption barriers. We are developing end-to-end solutions for next-generation sequencing, resulting in a sample-in, result-out workflow. Our Systems Technology Group focuses on advancing technologies to enhance DNA sequencing workflows.

We are seeking a Principal Fluidic Systems Integration Engineer II to lead evaluation, integration, and optimization of novel fluidic and mechatronic systems during the earliest stages of research and development.

This is a hands-on, multidisciplinary role for a technical leader who works at the intersection of chemistry, molecular biology, biochemistry with hardware, surfaces, and materials. The ideal candidate thrives at the nexus, capable of testing system concepts, integrating subsystems, and optimizing performance from first principles.

This role requires close collaboration with scientific and design teams and will focus on integrating, characterizing, troubleshooting, and optimizing concepts and early prototypes. You will evaluate feasibility by integrating subsystems, conducting testing on breadboards and prototypes, identifying failure modes, and providing data-driven feedback to guide design iterations, ensuring a solid technical foundation for next-generation sequencing platforms.

• System Evaluation &Feasibility Assessment:
  Critically evaluate proposed fluidic architectures, subsystems, and workflows for next-generation sequencing applications. Integrate, test, and characterize early-stage hardware to establish fundamental feasibility and de-risk new approaches through rigorous experimentation.

• Workflow Integration & Optimization:
  Lead efforts to translate complex chemical, biochemical and molecular biology protocols from benchtop to early-stage instruments, breadboards, and test fixtures with novel fluidic and microfluidic systems. Optimize fluidic protocols and hardware interactions for performance, reliability, and robustness.

• Hands-on Testing & Characterization:
  Specify requirements, assemble, commission, and utilize custom test fixtures, breadboards, and automation scripts (e.g., Python) for early-stage system characterization, proof-of-concept validation, and feasibility studies.

• Hypothesis-Driven Experimentation:
  Design and execute rigorous experiments to characterize system performance. Push the boundaries of new technologies, identify critical failure modes at the interface of biology, chemistry, and hardware, and drive optimization efforts.

• First-Principles Troubleshooting:
  Lead early-stage, deep-dive troubleshooting for complex performance issues on novel systems, connecting failures back to first-principles root causes—whether molecular, chemical, material, physical, or control-related.

• Data Analysis & Communication:
  Analyze complex, multi-modal data sets and author technical reports, characterization summaries, and feasibility studies. Generate intellectual property related to integration and optimization methods, and present findings to technical teams and R&D leadership to inform roadmap decisions.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Feedback:
  Serve as a key technical partner to assay development scientists and hardware design engineers, providing data-driven feedback to guide co-development and refinement of reagents, consumables, and instrument hardware. Ensure biological requirements and engineering constraints are…