Technical Excellence Internship

Roche fosters diversity, equity and inclusion, representing the communities we serve. When dealing with healthcare on a global scale, diversity is an essential ingredient to success. We believe that inclusion is key to understanding people’s varied healthcare needs. Together, we embrace individuality and share a passion for exceptional care. Join Roche, where every voice matters.

The Position

About us

We are Roche, a biotechnology company with an annual revenue of over $70 billion, 100,000+ employees in over 150 countries.

Roche has its head office in Basel, Switzerland. The internship will be based out of this office.

You can learn more about the company here , and also visit our careers website here .

Throughout our 125-year history, Roche has grown into one of the world’s largest biotech companies, as well as a leading provider of in-vitro diagnostics and a global supplier of transformative innovative solutions across major disease areas.

We focus on finding new medicines and diagnostics and establishing data-based insights that evolve the practice of medicine and help patients live longer, better lives.

A 60 second video summary of our organization can be found here: Roche in 60 seconds

Problem Statement

Clinical trials generate a lot of data, at Roche/Genentech, we use this data in order to make clinical trials more efficient, and effective. Joining Roche/Genentech, you will be at the forefront of innovation within drug discovery and clinical trials. Whether it is in developing open source tools or developing tools that will be used by more than 1000 fellow Roche/Genentech data scientists, you will be working in a multifaceted international team that will be developing and testing software prototypes.

The tool that you will be helping to build will seamlessly integrate quality and risk management into clinical trial design and operation, thus preempting risks and recognising or avoiding potential data quality issues at an early stage. Joining a team of inspired professionals with your skills in software development, you will redesign and improve it into a robust widely adopted solution. It will encompass the downstream processes related to clinical trial data quality oversight.

Main objectives of the internship:

Product Design

Understand and Apply Product Design: Gain a solid understanding of product design in the context of drug discovery.

Exploration Phase: Learn how teams define and iterate on planned analyses listed in the tool, and understand how these analyses evolve over time.

Workflow Insight: Develop a thorough understanding of the entire workflow, from initial concept to insight generation.

Technology Evaluation: Evaluate various technologies to determine the best solution for upgrading the web application, with a focus on the R Shiny framework, Python, and SQL.

Collaboration

Stakeholder Interaction: Work closely with data science stakeholders to ensure alignment of goals and expectations.

Peer Collaboration: Collaborate directly with other interns and receive constructive feedback on code and stakeholder interactions from your supervisor.

Data Modeling and Software Engineering

Data Model Design: Design a data model to gather and speed up loading of the data

Software Development: Develop and implement various software components to extract meaningful data insights. UI: Add some visuals / dashboards / predictive analytics and other insights. More specifically, some of our tools are based on the R Shiny framework, precisely open-source Teal framework: https://github.com/insightsengineering/teal

Who you are

Required Qualifications:

• You are currently enrolled as Master student or graduated within 1 year

• Strong background in computer science or related fields.

• Solid knowledge of Python and/or R (including R Shiny).

• Proficiency in SQL.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Interest in drug discovery (considered a plus).

• Diverse, multidisciplinary approach to software development, including:

• Understanding user needs.

• Evaluating the pros and cons of various technologies.

• Proficiency in additional programming languages (e.g., C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, etc.).

• Familiarity with CI/CD principles.

• Experience with package development (unit testing, debugging).

• Knowledge of collaborative software development tools (e.g., GitHub, GitLab).

• Understanding of Machine Learning frameworks.

Application Guidance:

Highlight relevant projects and the technology stack used for each in your application.

Willingness to experiment and learn new technologies is highly valued.

Due to regulations non-EU/EFTA citizens must provide a certificate from the university stating that an internship is mandatory as part of the application documents

Why joining us

Joining Roche/Genentech, you will be exposed to some of the latest tools in drug discovery. We have our own internal tools like a ChatGPT instance that you will be able to experiment with. Additionally, we have some pioneering work being done that encompasses machine learning to automate clinical trials. Part of your time with Roche/Genentech will be allocated to some of these other projects that suit your interests.

The student will be working alongside a technical project manager and fellow team members who will provide technical and non-technical guidance to the student for the entire duration of the project. The student will be wholly embedded as a team member and actively participate in team ceremonies and events. The student will be mentored by the team lead who will actively coach, train and review their work on a regular basis.

The research that the student will conduct for the project will have high impact, pragmatic implications that will be directly beneficial to a large team of software developers and end users alike. Moreover, the insights generated from the data that the student collects and analyzes will be used to assess the impact of their work over time, thereby providing a KPI to measure success of their work.

All teams are very flexible in their approaches to problem solving, and we collectively operate as a single unit. The student will be part of a continuously growing team where new ideas are always appreciated and welcomed.

From a cultural perspective, all team members are very eager to deliver high quality products and are aware that their work has a positive impact in the open source community. It is an environment where the learning never stops and the technology is always cutting edge. The student entering this project will experience the open, collaborative culture first-hand.

Who we are

At Roche, more than 100,000 people across 100 countries are pushing back the frontiers of healthcare. Working together, we’ve become one of the world’s leading research-focused healthcare groups. Our success is built on innovation, curiosity and diversity.

Basel is the headquarters of the Roche Group and one of its most important centres of pharmaceutical research. Over 10,700 employees from over 100 countries come together at our Basel/Kaiseraugst site, which is one of Roche`s largest sites. Read more .

Besides extensive development and training opportunities, we offer flexible working options, 18 weeks of maternity leave and 10 weeks of gender independent partnership leave. Our employees also benefit from multiple services on site such as child-care facilities, medical services, restaurants and cafeterias, as well as various employee events.

We believe in the power of diversity and inclusion, and strive to identify and create opportunities that enable all people to bring their unique selves to Roche.