Senior Specialist, ESE ML Engineer

Merck; India; Hybrid; INR 1,500,000 - 3,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Merck Hyderabad Tech Center is hiring a Senior Specialist, ESE ML Engineer. You will design, build and maintain scalable data pipelines and platforms, ensuring reliability, performance and governance through automation and monitoring.

You will partner with data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into production-grade pipelines. You will work in a matrix setup, report to functional and project managers, and contribute to planning, delivery and cross-team

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or related field.
• 7-11 years of experience building data pipelines and data infrastructure in life sciences context.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain data pipelines for analytics and AI applications.
• Validate data quality through experiments and monitor ML pipelines.
• Collaborate with data scientists and business stakeholders to meet requirements.
• Integrate AI/ML models into production systems with scalable data flows.
• Build platforms for ingestion, transformation, and orchestration across sources.

Skills

Python (PySpark)

SQL

AI/ML frameworks

Experiment design

AWS S3

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Data pipelines

Education

Bachelor's in IT/CS

Tools

Airflow

Prefect

Azure Data Factory

Job description

Senior Specialist, ESE ML Engineer

Join a global biopharma company with a 130-year legacy and mission to achieve new milestones in healthcare. Be part of technology driven, data-led organization supporting a diversified portfolio of medicines, vaccines and animal health products. Work alongside passionate teams that use data, analytics and insights to drive decisions, and tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology Centers are globally distributed hubs that enable our digital transformation and business outcomes across IT. They bring together diverse teams to collaborate, share best practices, and deliver solutions that save and improve lives.

This role is based at our Hyderabad Tech Center and follows a hybrid working model (3 days onsite, 2 days remote). Candidates are expected to reside within commuting distance of the Hyderabad office.

Role Overview

As an ML Engineer with a strong software engineering and AI focus, you will design, build and maintain scalable data pipelines and platforms and ensure pipeline reliability, performance and governance through automation, monitoring, logging and documentation. You will partner with data scientists, analysts and business stakeholders to translate requirements into production-grade, observable pipelines, and act as a strategic advisor to the business on what the data can actually support. You will operate within a matrix environment, participating in project planning, delivery and cross-team collaboration.

What will you do in this role:

• Design, develop, and maintain data pipelines to extract and enrich, and process data for advanced analytics and AI applications.
• Design and execute structured experiments to validate data quality, measure the impact of data enrichment pipelines, and evaluate ML pipeline performance.
• Work closely with data scientists, analysts, and business teams to understand data requirements and deliver solutions aligned with business goals.
• Integrate AI and machine learning models into production systems, ensuring scalable and resilient data flows.
• Build and maintain platforms that support data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration across various data sources, both internal and external.
• Use data orchestration, logging, and monitoring tools to build resilient pipelines.
• Automate data flows and pipeline monitoring to ensure scalability, performance, and resilience of the platform.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve issues related to the data integration platform, ensuring uptime and reliability.
• Maintain thorough documentation for integration processes, configurations, and code to ensure easy onboarding for new team members and future scalability.
• Develop pipelines to ingest data into cloud data warehouses.
• Create and deliver standard reports in accordance with stakeholder needs.
• Work within a matrix organizational structure, reporting to both the functional manager and the project manager.
• Participate in project planning, execution, and delivery, ensuring alignment with both functional and project goals.

What should you have:

• Bachelors' degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or any Technology stream.
• 7-11 years of experience in developing data pipelines & data infrastructure, ideally within a drug development or life sciences context.

Preferred Skills:

Primary Skills (Must have):

• Strong software engineering background with solid programming experience in Python (including PySpark) and robust SQL skills.
• Proven experience working with AI/ML frameworks and integrating machine learning models into production systems.
• Hands-on experience with experiment design (e.g., A/B testing, statistical validation) to evaluate and validate the quality of data enrichment and ML pipelines.
• Practical experience with AWS S3 and core AWS console concepts (IAM, regions, basic cloud architecture)
• Experience with cloud object storage (e.g., Amazon S3) and cloud data warehouses or lakehouses (e.g., Redshift, Snowflake, Azure Synapse, Delta Lake)
• Familiarity with data modeling, ETL/ELT patterns, and data transformation best practices
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, and data quality checks for operational pipelines
• Familiarity with CI/CD concepts and pipelines for data deployments, experience with Git-based tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps)
• Proven ability to work collaboratively with data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders
• Good interpersonal and communication skills (verbal and written)
• Product and customer-centric approach and innovative thinking.

Secondary Skills (Nice to have):

• Prior experience in a global or matrixed organization
• Exposure to observability and data quality platforms (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations, Deequ)
• Knowledge of orchestration and scheduling tools (Airflow, Prefect, Azure Data Factory).

Who we are:

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and M