Senior AI/ML Platform Engineer (Cloud & DevOps)

Job Description

Senior AI/ML Platform Engineer (Cloud & DevOps) 

The Senior AI/ML Platform Engineer owns the cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and platform tooling behind our team's Generative AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications and services. Key focus areas will include maintaining and evolving AWS Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD for our data pipelines, APIs, and applications; secure data transfer from external content providers; self-service hosting patterns that let data scientists and developers easily put their work in front of users; and operating infrastructure services such as OpenSearch. This platform supports critical use cases spanning early-stage scientific research to post-market surveillance, including systematic literature reviews, competitive intelligence, target identification, and safety monitoring. 

You'll work directly alongside the data scientists and engineers who use the platform. You will have the autonomy to propose and try new tools, see your work streamline complex workflows, and ultimately help bring therapeutics to patients. As you grow, you'll have opportunities to expand into emerging areas, such as infrastructure for AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. The position is embedded within a cross-disciplinary team of data scientists, bioinformaticians, and engineers dedicated to using cutting-edge AI/ML and data science techniques to drive drug discovery and development. 

What you will do:

• Developer platform: Build self-service paths that let data scientists and developers ship their work to users quickly, leveraging shared enterprise platforms or custom AWS infrastructure as needed, and drive development of complex platform initiatives 

• Requirements validation: Partner closely with stakeholders to clarify requirements and critically examine them for assumptions, feasibility, consistency, and completeness throughout the design lifecycle 

• Platform standards: Shape easy-to-follow infrastructure, CI/CD, and operational standards across the team 

• Solution design: Write technical specifications that weigh architectural options, trade-offs, and risks, recommending the best-fit tools and approaches 

• Reliable delivery: Make builds and releases fast, secure, and repeatable, with reviews, automated quality gates, and change control 

• Cloud environments: Provision, scale, patch, and upgrade environments, and lead cost, capacity, and performance tuning across our cloud footprint 

• Operational excellence: Track site reliability engineering (SRE) metrics against the team's reliability targets, and run monitoring, issue triage, and root cause analysis to keep applications highly available 

• AI-enabled operations: Integrate agents into platform operations, such as automated alert triage, incident diagnosis, and automated fixes for failed builds, with appropriate human oversight 

• Knowledge building: Mentor team members through design discussions and constructive infrastructure and code reviews, and translate technical knowledge into clear, comprehensive documentation and onboarding materials 

What you should have

• 5+ years of professional experience in cloud, DevOps, or platform engineering 

• 3+ years of experience authoring Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions) to provision resources and deploy workloads on a major cloud provider (AWS preferred) 

• Experience owning production operations, including infrastructure monitoring and incident management 

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience 

What we offer:

• Exciting work in a great team, global projects, international environment
• Opportunity to learn and grow professionally within the company globally
• Hybrid working model, flexible role pattern
• Competitive salary & incentive pay
• Pension and health insurance contributions
• Internal reward system and referral scheme
• 5  weeks annual leave, 5 sick days, 15 days of certified sick leave paid above statutory requirements annually, 40  paid hours annually for volunteering activities, 12 weeks of parental contribution
• Cafeteria for tax free benefits according to your choice (meal vouchers, sport, culture, health, travel, etc.), Multisport Card
• Vodafone, Raiffeisen Bank, Foodora, and discount programs
• Up-to-date laptop and iPhone
• Parking in the garage, showers, refreshments, massage chairs, library, music corner

Additional job details 

In addition to building and maintaining our suite of tools, our team consults on how software capabilities, data products, and AI/ML can support the projects of our 5,000+ stakeholders (scientists, engineers, regulatory liaisons, data scientists, etc.) across our multi-national organization. We strive to enhance data science, NLP, and AI literacy across these groups. 

As part of our work, our team has opportunities to coauthor internal and external presentations, white papers, manuscripts, and/or open-source code releases. We invest in your professional growth by providing access to specialized learning platforms, opportunities to attend industry conferences, participation in internal communities of practice, and the chance to learn the science of drug discovery and development directly from domain experts. 

Additional location(s) Compensation Information:

Required Skills:

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud Networking, Data Engineering, Design Applications, Generative AI, Git, GitHub, Information Systems, Machine Learning (ML), Python (Programming Language), Shell Scripting, Software Development, System Designs, System Integration, Testing

Preferred Skills:

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

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:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements:

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Valid Driving License:

Hazardous Material(s):

Job Posting End Date:

11/24/2026

*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.