Senior Data Scientist – ML Engineering & MLOps

About the role

Roche is looking for a Senior Data Scientist specialized in ML Engineering and MLOps to join the Global Analytics and Technology Center of Excellence (GATE) in San José, Costa Rica. You will own the full lifecycle of machine‑learning models, turning them into reliable, scalable production services for Roche affiliates worldwide.

Key responsibilities

• Architect, deploy and maintain cloud‑native ML pipelines, containerized services and orchestration tools (Airflow/Dagster) with strict SLAs.
• Design reusable MLOps platform components such as feature stores, model registries, experiment tracking and CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI or GitHub Actions.
• Build automated back‑testing, observability and drift detection frameworks to monitor model performance and data quality.
• Implement cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure or GCP and automate manual tasks while ensuring data synchronization contracts.
• Provide technical leadership, conduct code reviews, refactor research code and mentor data scientists on production‑grade software practices.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Statistics or a related quantitative field.
• 7+ years of experience operating and maintaining production ML systems.
• Current residence in Costa Rica or valid work authorization for San José.

Required skills

• Python, Linux/Bash, SQL.
• Modern pipeline tools: Spark, dbt, Snowflake, Databricks.
• Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes.
• MLOps tools: MLflow, Weights & Biases, Airflow.
• CI/CD automation: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions.
• Cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP.
• ML frameworks: scikit‑learn, XGBoost, PyTorch, TensorFlow.