Sr. Specialist, AI Engineering

MSD; Hyderabad; Hybrid; INR 3,200,000 - 5,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Merck & Co., Inc. in Hyderabad is seeking a Senior/Principal AI Engineer to lead end-to-end GenAI application development, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, and LLM-based workflows.

You will mentor teams, drive responsible AI practices, and translate complex AI capabilities into scalable business solutions. You will design and implement agentic AI systems, develop multi-agent workflows, and establish AgentOps with observability and monitoring in a globally distributed

Qualifications

• Masters in a relevant quantitative field (Statistics, Econometrics, CS, Mathematics, Engineering).
• Minimum of 5 years of work experience in end-to-end ML model development and deployment in cloud environments (Databricks preferred).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement multi-agent AI systems enabling multi-step reasoning and orchestration.
• Develop and operationalize multi-agent systems with planning, tool usage, memory, and iterative reasoning.
• Apply advanced prompt engineering techniques to improve accuracy and robustness of LLM systems.
• Establish AgentOps practices with observability, tracing, logging, and monitoring for production AI systems.
• Build multimodal AI solutions integrating text with images or structured data.

Skills

RAG architectures

Prompt engineering

LLM-powered apps

AgentOps

Python

Context engineering

MCP & A2A

ML pipelines

NLP

Transformer models

Education

Masters in quantitative field

Tools

LangChain

Google ADK

Semantic Kernel

Vertex AI

Databricks

AWS

GCP

GitHub Copilot

Codex

Claude CLI

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:

• Design and implement Agentic AI systems leveraging frameworks such as LangChain, Google ADK, Strands, and Semantic Kernel, enabling multi-step reasoning and task orchestration.
• Develop and operationalize multi-agent systems, incorporating patterns such as planning, tool usage, memory, and iterative reasoning.
• Apply advanced prompt engineering techniques (ReAct, few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, prompt chaining) to improve accuracy, determinism, and robustness of LLM systems.
• Establish AgentOps practices, including observability, tracing, logging, and performance monitoring for production-grade AI 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, Econometrics, 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)

• Deep expertise in RAG architectures, including embedding generation, retrieval optimization, grounding, and context management.
• Proficiency in prompt engineering techniques (ReAct, chain-of-thought, few-shot learning, prompt chaining, instruction refinement).
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications and agent-based systems in production environments.
• 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.
• Experience designing context engineering strategies, including chunking, context optimization, and prompt-context alignment.
• 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.
• Experience building ML/AI pipelines, including automation, orchestration, and CI/CD integration.
• Solid expertise in NLP and text processing, including tokenization, embeddings, and preprocessing pipelines.
• Understanding of transformer architectures and modern LLM ecosystems.
• Understanding of basic machine learning, including supervised/unsupervised learning concepts and model evaluation techniques.

Secondary skills (nice to have)

• Experience with advanced agentic patterns, such as planner-executor, reflection, and memory-augmented agents.
• 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.
• 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 century, we have been 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.

Required Skills:

• Animal Vaccination, Biopharmaceutical Industry, Collaborative Development, Databricks Platform, Data Engineering, Design Applications, Digital Transformation, Disease Prevention, Econometrics, Information Security, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Performance Monitoring, Prompt Engineering, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), System Designs, System Integration, Technical Leadership, Testing, Unsupervised Learning

Preferred Skills:

• Agentic AI, LLMOps, Machine Learning Operations

Employee Details

• Employee Status: Regular
• Relocation: Domestic
• VISA Sponsorship: No
• Travel Requirements: No Travel Required
• Flexible Work Arrangements: Hybrid
• Shift: Not Indicated
• Valid Driving License: No
• Hazardous Material(s): n/a