Specialist, AI 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 TechnologyCentersfocus 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, TechCentersare 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 TechCenterhelps 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 mustleveragethe strength of our team to collaborate globally tooptimizeconnections and share best practices across the TechCenters.

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 ensuringhigh standardsof 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:

• ImplementAgentic AI systemsleveragingframeworks such asLangChain, Google ADK, Strands, and Semantic Kernel, enabling multi-step reasoning and task orchestration.

• Apply advancedprompt engineering techniques(ReAct, few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, prompt chaining) to improve accuracy, determinism, and robustness of LLM systems.

• Buildmultimodal AI solutions, integrating text with images or structured data to support complex enterprise use cases.

• Applyharness engineering practicesto systematically design, test, and evaluate AI/agent workflows across different scenarios.

• Develop reusableagent tooling and integrations, enabling interaction with enterprise services, tools, and workflows, includingModel Context Protocol (MCP)andAgent-to-Agent (A2A)communication patterns.

• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to translate business problems intoscalable GenAI-driven solutions.

• Leverage modern AI developer tooling such asClaude CLI, GitHub Copilot, Vertex AI, and Codexto accelerate development workflows.

• Support deployment and operationalization of AI solutions usingcloud 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)

• ExpertiseinRAG architectures, including embedding generation, retrieval optimization, grounding, and context management.

• Experience inprompt engineering techniques

• Experience implementingAgentOpspractices, including observability, tracing, logging, and performance evaluation of AI systems.

• Strong Python programming skills with experience intooling, function-calling, and agent-driven integrations.

• Familiarity withharness engineering approachesfor systematic testing, validation, and benchmarking of AI systems.

• Understanding ofModel Context Protocol (MCP)andAgent-to-Agent (A2A)interaction patterns.

• SolidexpertiseinNLP and text processing, including tokenization, embeddings, and preprocessing pipelines.

• Understanding oftransformer architectures and modern LLM ecosystems.

Secondary skills (nice to have)

• Exposure tomultimodal AI systemsinvolving text, vision, or structured data fusion.

• Familiarity withLLM evaluation techniques, including synthetic test generation and prompt regression testing.

• Experience withadvanced chunking strategiesand context window optimization.

• Hands-on experience withTensorFlow orPyTorchfor custom model development or experimentation.

• Exposure toLLMOps/MLOpspracticesfor 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.