I am Gourav, and I started my career with excitement in a start-up focused on designing drones and using advanced technology right after my engineering degree in 2016. Over the course of time, my passion shifted from drones to computational and analytical methods used in designing them. This approach was a game changer in my career path as I realised that the same methods can be used in a lot of business applications rather than just in core engineering. I started to delve deep into analytical methods, math and stats, and entered the domain of data analytics a year later.
 
After a couple more years of hustling in an e-commerce start-up, I joined the Global Analytics and Technology Center of Excellence (GATE) team at Roche in May 2021 – right in the middle of the second wave of COVID-19 in India. To be honest, I wasn’t very sure as to how I would fit in here as I had very little experience in the healthcare domain prior to joining Roche. But the in-house ecosystem at GATE was very welcoming and gave me the right amount of time to get onboarded with the right set of tools. Within just a few months, I not only started to own the project’s deliverables but also started to contribute towards the team’s internal initiatives.

Roche is a huge organisation with affiliates all over the world but the GATE team was formed just over a few years ago. I personally feel that this is the best environment to be in as it combines the strong growth mindset of a start-up with the stability of a multinational company. There are immense opportunities to learn new technologies and gain exposure to multiple high-profile commercial projects the firm deals with. With the team’s recent partnerships with global units, I have been given the chance to interact and collaborate with my overseas colleagues in the fields of digitisation, machine learning and data science. These projects span various sectors, from finance to procurement and supply chain.