Associate Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Job Description
Associate Director – Forward Deployed Engineering
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 companys’ 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
Provide hands-on technical and engineering leadership for digitally enabled authoring and localization products, including AI-assisted authoring and machine translation.
Embed with regulatory authors, translators, localization specialists and product teams to understand high-value problems, rapidly validate ideas and mature successful concepts into maintainable, production-grade solutions.
Bridge regulatory needs, product strategy, architecture and engineering execution while ensuring security, privacy, validation, auditability, Responsible AI and operational supportability.
Key Responsibilities
Build a strong understanding of regulatory authoring processes, user needs, systems, data and content flows, including clinical and regulatory document development.
Partner directly with regulatory authors, product managers, architects, data scientists, UX specialists and software engineers to identify high-impact opportunities and translate ambiguous requirements into practical technical solutions.
Lead rapid discovery, prototyping, user validation, solution shaping, production delivery and adoption for digital and AI-enabled authoring capabilities.
Design and deliver scalable capabilities for AI-assisted content generation, content reuse, structured content, review and quality control, source-to-output traceability and document intelligence.
Design and deliver localization and machine-translation capabilities, including terminology management, translation memory, quality estimation, human review workflows, feedback capture and measurable translation-quality monitoring.
Architect Generative AI solutions using large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, enterprise knowledge retrieval and knowledge graph patterns where appropriate.
Design agentic authoring and review workflows, including orchestration, tool integration, guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls.
Establish prompt engineering, prompt management, evaluation, versioning, reuse and lifecycle practices for dependable Generative AI delivery.
Design secure, modular and reusable cloud-native architectures, APIs, microservices, event-driven integrations and data pipelines across AWS and, where required, Google Cloud Platform, connecting authoring and localization solutions with regulatory platforms, structured data sources and enterprise AI services.
Provide hands-on implementation support, reference architectures, design reviews, code-level guidance and reusable engineering patterns.
Prefer enterprise and out-of-the-box capabilities over unnecessary custom solutions, while clearly documenting trade-offs where custom engineering is justified.
Embed quality by design through automated testing, AI evaluation, grounding, hallucination controls, performance testing and production-readiness reviews.
Drive DevOps and MLOps practices including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated deployment, monitoring, alerting, model/service observability and release governance.
Ensure architecture and engineering decisions meet requirements for security, privacy, reliability, scalability, cost, validation, auditability and operational resilience in a regulated environment.
Implement Responsible AI and AI governance controls, including risk assessment, explainability, transparency, human oversight, monitoring and regulatory readiness.
Mentor engineers within the Hyderabad Technology Centre and strengthen modern software engineering, AI engineering and AI-assisted development practices.
Create and maintain technical documentation, reference implementations, decision records and reusable assets that improve delivery consistency and long-term ownership.
Act as a trusted technical bridge across Regulatory, Product, Architecture, AI/Data Science, Security, Quality and Engineering teams, with accountability for measurable business outcomes.
Primary Skills
Software Engineering Leadership, Python, Generative AI/LLMs, Agentic AI, RAG, Prompt Engineering, REST APIs, SQL/Data Engineering, AWS, Git/GitHub, CI/CD, Docker, Automated Testing, Solution Architecture and Forward-Deployed Engineering.
Secondary Skills
TypeScript/JavaScript, React, Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, AI Observability/Evaluation, Enterprise Security, Veeva Vault and regulated life-sciences technology experience.
What You Should Have
Education
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
Significant experience in software engineering and solution architecture, with demonstrated technical leadership delivering complex enterprise platforms and products into production.
Proven ability to lead multidisciplinary, globally distributed engineering teams and provide technical direction across architecture, engineering, AI and cloud technologies.
Strong expertise in Python and modern backend engineering, including REST APIs, microservices and service-oriented architectures.
Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering production-grade Generative AI solutions using LLMs, embeddings, RAG, vector/semantic search and prompt-driven workflows.
Strong understanding of agentic AI architectures, including workflow orchestration, tool use, guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls and evaluation.
Experience designing solutions involving structured and unstructured data, document processing, metadata, enterprise search/retrieval and scalable data pipelines.
Experience with localisation or language technologies, including machine translation, multilingual NLP, terminology management, translation memory, automated quality evaluation or human-in-the-loop review.
Strong experience with AWS and/or Google Cloud Platform and cloud-native architectures, including containers, Kubernetes and serverless patterns.
Strong understanding of DevOps and MLOps engineering practices, including Git-based development, CI/CD, automated testing, deployment, monitoring and observability.
Demonstrated ability to make architecture and engineering trade-off decisions across scalability, performance, security, reliability, maintainability, cost and speed of delivery.
Ability to establish secure, resilient and compliant engineering solutions, including identity and access management, encryption, logging, auditability and operational controls.
Strong understanding of AI evaluation, grounding, Responsible AI, model/service observability and AI risk controls.
Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into technical strategy, architecture and executable engineering plans, working closely with Product, Business, Architecture and Engineering stakeholders.
Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders, drive technical decisions and lead engineering teams through complex transformation and delivery.
Our technology teams operate as business partners, proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver services and solutions that help everyone be more productive and enable innovation.
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 inventing , 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 t

Work arrangement
Hybrid