Job Description
Associate Director , Solution Architecture
The Opportunity
- Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare.
- Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products.
- Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.
Our Technology Centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of our company's’ IT operating model, Tech Centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy.
A focused group of leaders in each Tech Center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers.
Role Overview
We aspire to be the premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company. As a member of our central Data Analytics team, you will design, deliver, and govern enterprise-grade data analytics solutions and reusable data products that accelerate decision-making across our research & development division. Join us to translate scientific needs into scalable, secure, compliant analytics architectures, and champion standards, reuse, and platform adoption across R&D.
What will you do in this role
- Define and maintain enterprise reference architectures, standards, and reusable patterns for R&D analytics (data ingestion, storage, processing, modeling, serving, visualization).
- Drive platform-level decisions and technology selections that maximize reuse and minimize duplication across R&D sub-domains.
- Partner with R&D domain leads, data stewards, and functional teams to align analytics roadmaps and prioritize capabilities.
- Design canonical data models, shared data products, and semantic layers that enable consistent analytics across discovery, preclinical, and clinical datasets.
- Create patterns and templates for reusable ETL/ELT pipelines, metadata catalogs, and data quality frameworks to ensure consistency and regulatory traceability.
- Architect infrastructure and patterns to support regulated analytics and ML workflows centrally (model governance, registries, feature stores, reproducible pipelines) while enabling domain-specific experimentation.
- Collaborate with enterprise InfoSec, privacy, and quality teams to implement organization-wide controls (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11 where applicable, GDPR/HIPAA, audit logs) across R&D analytics solutions.
- Provide technical leadership to platform engineering and integration teams delivering central services; define non-functional requirements, SLAs, and runbooks.
- Establish centralized monitoring, observability, and support models and coordinate incident response with R&D stakeholders.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and patterns for central adoption (federated learning, synthetic data) and run enterprise-level pilots.
What should you have
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Engineering, or related field.
- 10+ years in data/analytics architecture or engineering with at least 5+ years in solution architecture.
- Deep domain knowledge of drug discovery, preclinical, and clinical processes.
- Deep experience with enterprise data architectures: data lakes/warehouses, ELT/ETL patterns, streaming, semantic layers, and canonical modeling.
- Proficiency with cloud offerings for data transformation and modeling.
- Familiarity with AWS services including S3, Redshift, Lambda, and IAM for cloud-native data architecture.
- Working knowledge of capabilities for enterprise reporting and Conversational BI.
- Deep expertise with Databricks including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog.
- Proficiency in Python, SQL, and R; familiarity with Spark, Kubernetes, and workflow orchestration tools such as Airflow.
- CI/CD experience for data platforms using GitHub Actions.
- Experience implementing data governance, metadata management (catalogs), lineage, data quality, and access-control frameworks.
- Knowledge of life sciences standards (CDISC, HL7/FHIR), ontologies, and regulatory considerations.
- Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration experience in centralized IT/data organizations.
- Ability to balance enterprise priorities with research agility and to influence without direct authority.
- Excellent communication, facilitation, and documentation skills.
Preferred
- Prior experience in a central platform or enterprise data team supporting multiple business units or domains.
- Understanding of modern data and analytics capabilities such as model-driven analytics, recommendation-driven analytics, and decision intelligence systems.
- Familiarity with federated data architectures, synthetic data, and privacy-preserving analytics.
- Cloud architect or TOGAF certifications and data governance certifications.
Who we are
We are known as well-known org Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.
What we look for
Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.
#HYDIT2025
Required Skills:
Data Modeling, Design Applications, Release Management, Requirements Management, Solution Architecture, System Designs, System Integration
Preferred Skills:
Current Employees apply HERE
Current Contingent Workers apply HERE
Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.
Employee Status:
Regular
Relocation:
VISA Sponsorship:
Travel Requirements:
Flexible Work Arrangements:
Not Applicable
Shift:
Valid Driving License:
Hazardous Material(s):
Job Posting End Date:
05/21/2026
*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.
