Senior Software Engineer - Lab Automation

Position: Senior Software Engineer -  Lab Automation
Benefits

#ComputationCoE

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 maximizing these opportunities. The new Computational Sciences Center of Excellence (CoE) is a strategic, unified group whose goal is to harness this transformative power of data and Artificial Intelligence to assist our scientists to deliver more innovative and transformative medicines for patients worldwide.

The

Opportunity

At Genentech (gRED) and Roche (pRED), we’re applying software, robotics, and advanced AI to solve one of humanity’s hardest challenges: building fully autonomous, self-healing laboratories for lights-out drug discovery. Advances in AI, data, and computational sciences are transforming drug discovery and development. The Computational Sciences Center of Excellence (CoE) and the Data and Digital Catalyst (DDC) team are building the foundational platform for autonomous labs—turning frontier AI models, rich physical telemetry, and multi-vendor robotics into resilient, intelligent systems that run complex science unattended around the clock to deliver life-saving medicines to patients faster than ever before.

As a Senior Software Engineer – Lab Automation, you will be the essential bridge connecting software architecture, frontier AI models, and real-world physical instrumentation. You will architect the hardware abstraction layers, instrument integration frameworks, and orchestration engines that allow diverse lab automation platforms to operate with seamless reliability and closed-loop error recovery. If you are inspired by the challenge of building a robust software backbone powering autonomous science, this is your opportunity to pioneer the next generation of automated laboratories at global scale.

In

this role, you will:

• Design, program, and troubleshoot high-throughput lab workflows ensuring robust assay execution on physical hardware.
• Build orchestration systems, hardware abstraction layers, and instrument drivers that manage retries, handle shared resource contention, and enable 24/7 unattended operation.
• Implement telemetry, logging, metrics, and alerting across hardware and software to diagnose failures and resolve root causes using software hooks or vision models rather than relying on manual workarounds.
• Build systems to maintain an accurate real‑time digital representation of the lab, including sample tracking, instrument state, and reagent availability, with bidirectional integration into LIMS and ELNs.
• Manage hardware requirements, site constraints, communication protocols, and workcell integration from initial mechanical layout and prototyping through production deployment.
• Work directly with software engineers, automation scientists, and hardware engineers to translate complex scientific protocols into production‑grade technical architectures.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of software engineering and physical hardware integration experience, or an equivalent advanced degree with a proven industrial automation track record.
• Proficient in Python or C# for building modular software architectures, integration frameworks, and distributed services.
• Strong software engineering…