Specialist, AI Engineering

Merck; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Merck in Hyderabad seeks a Senior/Principal AI Engineer to drive end-to-end GenAI application development, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, and LLM-based workflows, delivering scalable, responsible AI solutions.

You will provide technical leadership, mentor teams, collaborate with stakeholders, and apply modern AI tools and cloud platforms to deploy production-ready AI capabilities that address global health challenges.

Qualifications

• Masters in a quantitative, applied field.
• Minimum 5 years end-to-end ML model development and deployment in cloud.
• Experience with production-grade AI systems and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end GenAI development, including prompt engineering and RAG pipelines.
• Architect scalable AI solutions with multi-model workflows.
• Mentor teams and translate business problems into AI-enabled solutions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to implement production-ready AI.
• Ensure responsible AI practices and measurable performance.

Skills

RAG architectures

Prompt engineering

AgentOps

Python

MCP/A2A

NLP

Transformers

Education

Master's degree in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering

Tools

LangChain

Google ADK

Semantic Kernel

Claude CLI

GitHub Copilot

Vertex AI

AWS / GCP

Job description

Job Description

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

As a Senior/Principal AI Engineer, you will drive the end-to-end development of GenAI applications, including prompt engineering, fine‑tuning, RAG pipelines, and LLM‑based workflows, while ensuring high standards of performance, scalability, and responsible AI practices. You will provide technical leadership, mentor teams, and translate complex AI capabilities into impactful business solutions.

What will you do in this role :

• Implement Agentic AI systems leveraging frameworks such as LangChain , Google ADK, Strands, and Semantic Kernel , enabling multi-step reasoning and task orchestration.
• Apply advanced prompt engineering techniques ( ReAct , few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, prompt chaining) to improve accuracy, determinism, and robustness of LLM systems.
• Build multimodal AI solutions , integrating text with images or structured data to support complex enterprise use cases.
• Apply harness engineering practices to systematically design, test, and evaluate AI/agent workflows across different scenarios.
• Develop reusable agent tooling and integrations , enabling interaction with enterprise services, tools, and workflows, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication patterns.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to translate business problems into scalable GenAI-driven solutions .
• Leverage modern AI developer tooling such as Claude CLI, GitHub Copilot, Vertex AI, and Codex to accelerate development workflows.
• Support deployment and operationalization of AI solutions using cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP .

What should you have :

• Masters in a relevant quantitative, applied field (Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering)
• Minimum of 5 years of work experience in the end-to-end lifecycle of ML model development and deployment into production within a cloud infrastructure (Databricks is highly preferred).

Primary skills (must-have)

• Expertise in RAG architectures , including embedding generation, retrieval optimization, grounding, and context management.
• Experience in prompt engineering techniques
• Experience implementing AgentOps practices , including observability, tracing, logging, and performance evaluation of AI systems.
• Strong Python programming skills with experience in tooling, function‑calling, and agent‑driven integrations .
• Familiarity with harness engineering approaches for systematic testing, validation, and benchmarking of AI systems.
• Understanding of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interaction patterns.
• Solid expertise in NLP and text processing , including tokenization, embeddings, and preprocessing pipelines.
• Understanding of transformer architectures and modern LLM ecosystems .

Secondary skills (nice to have)

• Exposure to multimodal AI systems involving text, vision, or structured data fusion.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation techniques , including synthetic test generation and prompt regression testing.
• Experience with advanced chunking strategies and context window optimization.
• Hands‑on experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch for custom model development or experimentation.
• Exposure to LLMOps / MLOps practices for deployment, monitoring, and scaling AI systems.

Who we are:

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a cent