Meet Alexander About Innovation And Development | Roche

What are the greatest challenges the world is facing today? Questions like these motivate me!

Everybody will probably have a different list here, but to me it's topics like fighting climate change with sustainable technologies, starting to explore the universe beyond our own planet (yes, I am a big space fan!) - and bringing the healthcare system into the 21st century.
This last topic, while not discussed much in public, is very important to me! It's about bringing healthcare to a world that is increasingly driven by software, by incredibly capable digital solutions based on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. All with the aim to make healthcare of the highest quality a lot more effective and accessible to everyone!

My name is Alex, I'm 30 years old and I'm currently working as the Tech Lead of a software and platform engineering team. When I applied for a position at Roche, it was one of the most conscious decisions I ever made in my life. It was not only about deciding where I want to stay for the next 2 years of my career - but where I want to contribute a major portion of my life, potentially for decades!

At that time I was already following Roche for a while because its mission “Doing now what patients need next” is aligned with my personal values. I've seen how many hospitals are struggling with cumbersome software solutions and their slow, expensive, paper-based, human-driven processes. Those are highly susceptible to errors that can cause major negative impacts on the patient journey. I wanted to be part of the solution.

As one might expect, I got super excited when I found a job opening for a software engineering position within the organization "Digital Products and Enablement". This team provides multiple internal platforms that help other developers inside Roche to quickly create and deploy secure software to the cloud, labs, and hospitals. These solutions can then be deployed in a safe way, ultimately bringing benefits to end-users like doctors, hospital staff, patients, and lab operators.

In addition to agreeing with the overall vision of Roche, since I joined I'm also glad to see how things have evolved from a "great place to work"-perspective. Roche, which is not known to be a "digital native company", is showing a lot of potential. There are interesting initiatives popping up all over the place - starting with a powerful inner source movement, as well as seeing some true engineering culture emerge from the ground up.

Roche works on very exciting engineering problems, which can easily compete with the projects being taken up by big-tech corporations. In our team, for example, we do a lot of work using cutting-edge technologies, such as well-known open source software and tooling (like Kubernetes). On that topic, I am also proud of how we are active in the open source community, by contributing code and even open sourcing entire tools we built internally. Which is a great opportunity for our team's work to be recognized within the company and even beyond!

Overall, I'm very much looking forward to the years to come. I'm absolutely convinced that the healthcare industry will drastically transform in the coming decades - and I feel honored to be a part of it; helping Roche to be one of the companies that might lead this transformation into a 21st-century healthcare system. We are currently looking for committed, passionate individuals to join our growing team.