Medical Science Manager Leader (CVM)
About this opportunity
At Roche you can show up as yourself, embraced for the unique qualities you bring. Our culture encourages personal expression, open dialogue, and genuine connections, where you are valued, accepted and respected for who you are, allowing you to thrive both personally and professionally. This is how we aim to prevent, stop and cure diseases and ensure everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Join Roche, where every voice matters.
The Position
This Opportunity
The Medical Science Manager Lead (MSML) is the field medical commander and operational bridge between HQ medical strategy and on-the-ground scientific execution. Leading a high-caliber team of MSMs, the MSML ensures scientific rigor, operational excellence, and strict governance of field activities.
This role requires a rare blend of people leadership, field coaching, and strategic translation. The MSML translates high-level pipeline strategies (designed with Country Medical Managers) into actionable field engagement plans, maintains team momentum and retention across a multi-year pre-launch cycle, leads cross-specialty insight generation and ecosystem shaping, and drives an AI-enabled field medical organization.
Core Competencies & Strategic Responsibilities (Preferable skill sets)
People Leadership, Field Coaching & Talent Development: Building a high-performing team for now and the future. Spends 30–40% of time in the field conducting structured co-visits with MSLs, delivering immediate, actionable feedback on scientific narrative delivery, objection handling, active listening, and relationship management. Solves the unique challenge of pipeline-based medical engagement by establishing milestone-driven recognition, academic development paths, and career progression frameworks.
Field-to-HQ Insight Synthesis & Strategic Partnership: Filters and synthesizes high volumes of qualitative field interaction logs from MSMs into high-impact, thematic executive summaries for strategy development and optimization. Serves as the operational peer to Country Medical Managers, validating whether theoretical medical strategies, clinical value stories, and advisory board concepts are viable in actual hospital environments and actual clinical practice improvements.
Competitive Agility & Business Acumen: Thrives in a highly dynamic market characterized by rapid competitor Phase 2/3 readouts, changing standard-of-care baselines, and evolving domestic competition. Ensures that the MSM team is built for a fast changing environment and long term success.
Academic Rigor, Fast Learning & Evidence Mastery: Ensures team is readily equipped with the academic excellence to support peer-to-peer scientific exchange with top experts nationally, and capable of leading MSM team in supporting/landing key clinical trials and RWD projects.
AI Adoption & Digital Field Operations: Champions the practical application of up-to-date AI and digital technologies for tracking and optimization of key field medical activities and insight analysis across the country.
Candidate Qualifications & Baseline Requirements
Education: MD, PhD, or Master's in Clinical Medicine or Pharmacology (MD/PhD and specialty in Endocrinology, Hepatology, gastroenterology or cardiovascular medicine preferred).
Experience: 3+ years in MNC Medical Affairs, or 3+ years of clinical practice. (Experience in related disease areas & previous people management experience preferred)
Business Acumen: Demonstrated ability to connect scientific strategy with commercial realities and launch timing.
Languages: Native/Fluent Mandarin and high proficiency in written/spoken English
Who we are
A healthier future drives us to innovate. Together, more than 100’000 employees across the globe are dedicated to advance science, ensuring everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Our efforts result in more than 26 million people treated with our medicines and over 30 billion tests conducted using our Diagnostics products. We empower each other to explore new possibilities, foster creativity, and keep our ambitions high, so we can deliver life-changing healthcare solutions that make a global impact.
Let’s build a healthier future, together.
Roche is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Medical Affairs role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 399 comparable Manager Medical Affairs roles across 92 biopharma companies.
Salary context
98 of 399 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 399 comparable roles
+ 41 more countries
Seniority mix
399 of 399 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
133 of 399 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
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How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.