Associate Director, Data Engineering Leader

Job Description

Associate Director, Data Engineering Leader

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 organization 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 Canters 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 Canters 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 centres.

What will you do in this role: 

• Partner with colleagues in scientific data product line and stakeholders to understand the data priorities in support of research outcomes
• Partner with engineering teams in scientific data product line to understand and influence architectural choices and talent needs
• Define/Influence engineering squad configuration in collaboration with product manager and product tech lead to support roadmap objectives for products in Scientific Data Product Line
• Provide leadership to engineering squads in Hyderabad Tech Center (HTC) to design/engineer and implement data product features in support of research
• Define and implement data engineering strategies that align with organizational goals and data governance standards.  
• Connect with external partners and thought leaders to stay current on the latest technologies and trends in Data Engineering. 
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, tools, and frameworks that enhance productivity and data quality.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, career development planning, and succession planning.
• In collaboration with Scientific Data product Line leader and product line technical leader, understand current and future engineering talent needs
• Drive recruitment, onboarding, and retention of top data engineering talent.
• Develop and execute a learning roadmap for the engineering team in Tech Center (training, certifications, communities of practice, internal tech talks).
• Foster a culture of learning, innovation, psychological safety, and knowledge sharing.
• Understand the purpose of our company and role of research and research IT in support of this purpose
• Be an ambassador to help the team and broader HTC community understand and internalize this purpose
• Work with other engineering leaders in HTC to develop and participate in a community to learn engineering practices from each other
• Leverage enterprise engineering tools and processes and be an advocate for them in the team and beyond. Actively provide feedback to enterprise teams to evolve these tools and processes in support of research engineering needs

What Should you have: 

Qualifications

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Mathematics, or related field; or equivalent experience.
• Typically, 8+ years of experience in data engineering or related roles, with 3+ years in a leadership, lead engineer, or chapter/people lead capacity.
• Proven track record building and maintaining large-scale data platforms and pipelines in complex enterprise environments.
• Technical Skills
• Strong hands-on experience with modern data engineering technologies, such as:
• Programming: Python, Java, SQL
• Data processing: Spark, Databricks, dBt, Matillion
• Data warehousing / Lakehouse: Delta Lake, Redshift, Neptune
• Cloud platforms: AWS (preferred)/ Azure
• Streaming: Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, Event Hubs, etc.
• Solid understanding of:
• ETL/ELT concepts
• Data quality, metadata management, and observability
• CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and containerization (e.g., GitHub/GitLab CI, Jenkins, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Security, privacy, and compliance concepts (e.g., RBAC, encryption, PII handling).
• Leadership & Soft Skills
• Demonstrated ability to lead and grow technical teams and communities in a product team environment.
• Strong coaching and mentoring skills; able to develop both technical and behavioral capabilities.
• Strategic mindset with the ability to balance long-term architecture with short-term delivery needs.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, with experience of engaging senior stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in agile environments (Scrum/Kanban) and applying product centric ways of working.

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 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.

#HYDIT2026

Required Skills:

Business Intelligence (BI), Database Administration, Data Engineering, Data Management, Data Modeling, Data Visualization, Design Applications, Information Management, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), System Designs

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

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:

03/17/2026

*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.