Technical Lead, Software Engineering, Data Context Layer

Job Description

R400875 Technical Lead, Software Engineering, Data Context Layer

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

Role Overview

This role is part of a broader enterprise initiative to establish a

Data Context Layer (DCL)

— a foundational capability designed to provide consistent, reusable, and scalable context across enterprise data products.

The DCL is intended to address challenges related to

data fragmentation, lack of shared semantics, and inconsistent interpretation of data across systems and products

. It establishes a unified layer for representing context, relationships, and meaning, enabling downstream products to operate with greater consistency, interoperability, and intelligence.

In addition, the DCL plays a critical role in enabling

agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise

by providing the structured context and semantic grounding required for intelligent agents to operate reliably. This includes ensuring that agent-driven workflows and decisions are based on

consistent, governed, and interpretable data context

, reducing risks associated with fragmentation, ambiguity, and lack of control.

Within this initiative, we are seeking a Technical Lead for Platform Engineering to design and deliver the underlying platform capabilities that enable enterprise teams to

publish, discover, and consume standardized data context through self-service

. This role is responsible for building the core platform services, automation, deployment patterns, and operational foundations that make context services reliable, scalable, secure, and easy to adopt.

The ideal candidate has strong hands-on experience in platform engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer enablement, with familiarity in

data context, semantic platforms,, agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering

. This role focuses on making the broader context platform production-ready and operationally excellent.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and implementation of platform engineering capabilities that support the enterprise context ecosystem.

• Build and evolve shared platform services for:

  • deployment and release automation
  • environment provisioning
  • observability and monitoring
  • access control and security
  • reliability, scaling, and fault tolerance
  • CI/CD and operational tooling

• Partner with product, architecture, data engineering,, and service teams to translate platform requirements into implementable technical solutions.

• Establish reusable platform patterns that improve consistency, speed, and developer experience across teams.

• Support production readiness of context-serving capabilities, knowledge graph pipelines, APIs, and related services.

• Define technical standards and reference implementations for platform usage, deployment, and operations.

• Work with engineering teams to reduce friction in development-to-production workflows.

• Ensure platform capabilities support both traditional enterprise application patterns and

agentic AI workflows

.

• Evaluate and integrate relevant technologies and practices across cloud, infrastructure, observability, automation, and runtime operations.
• Help shape how the platform supports secure, scalable, and governed access to enterprise context.
• Drive operational excellence through incident readiness, rollback strategies, testing, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, site reliability, DevOps, or technical architecture roles.
• Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD, automation, observability, and production operations.
• Experience building shared platform capabilities used by multiple teams.
• Familiarity with

data context, semantic platforms,-driven systems, or knowledge graph ecosystems

.

• Working knowledge of

agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering

concepts.

• Ability to translate platform requirements into robust technical designs and implementation plans.
• Strong collaboration skills and experience supporting engineering teams in production environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with developer platforms, internal platforms, or platform-as-a-product models.
• Familiarity with MCP, A2A, timbr, or other context-serving technologies.
• Background in data platform operations, metadata services, or semantic infrastructure.
• Experience supporting AI-enabled applications or context-driven systems.
• Familiarity with security controls, service mesh, secrets management, and enterprise compliance requirements.
• Experience defining service-level objectives, operational metrics, and reliability standards.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means:

• platform services are stable, secure, and easy for teams to use
• development-to-production workflows are automated and repeatable
• the enterprise has reliable shared infrastructure for context-serving capabilities
• engineering teams can move faster with less operational friction
• platform patterns support both enterprise apps and AI/agentic use cases
• operational excellence improves adoption and trust in the platform

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:

Automation, Cloud Infrastructure, Context Mapping, Data Engineering, Data Visualization, Design, Design Applications, Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Infrastructure Engineering, Operational Excellence, Platform Engineering, Production Operations, Prompt Engineering, Semantic Web, Software Configurations, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, System Designs, System Integration, Testing

• Preferred Skills:

Metadata Services, Timber Frame, Unisys MCP

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Secondary

• Language(s) Job Description:

#MSDHYDIT

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:

No relocation

• VISA Sponsorship:

No

• Travel Requirements:

No Travel Required

• Flexible Work Arrangements:

Not Applicable

• Shift:

Not Indicated

• Valid Driving License:

No

• Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

• Job Posting End Date:

08/28/2026

*

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.

• 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, site reliability, DevOps, or technical architecture roles.
• Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD, automation, observability, and production operations.
• Experience building shared platform capabilities used by multiple teams.
• Familiarity with data context, semantic platforms,-driven systems, or knowledge graph ecosystems.
• Working knowledge of agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering concepts.
• Ability to translate platform requirements into robust technical designs and implementation plans.
• Strong collaboration skills and experience supporting engineering teams in production environments.
• Experience with developer platforms, internal platforms, or platform-as-a-product models.
• Familiarity with MCP, A2A, timbr, or other context-serving technologies.
• Background in data platform operations, metadata services, or semantic infrastructure.
• Experience supporting AI-enabled applications or context-driven systems.
• Familiarity with security controls, service mesh, secrets management, and enterprise compliance requirements.
• Experience defining service-level objectives, operational metrics, and reliability standards.