Associate Director, Data and AI Studio Product Architect

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Associate Director, Data and AI Studio Product Architect 

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.
• Lead an Organization driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that supports a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products.
• Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be the leaders who have a passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, which will allow 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 the MSD 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:

As a Data and AI Studio Architect within the Strategy and Architecture (SnA) organization, you will lead the evolution of our enterprise Data Engineering and Data Science ecosystem, supporting the Data and AI Studio product line. You will work closely with the Group Product Manager for the Data and AI Studio to design an AI agent–driven unified development environment for Data Engineering, analytics, and AI/ML workflows.  You will combine strategic technology leadership with hands-on architecture work, partnering closely with platform engineers to drive collaboration and ensure high-quality delivery across the Data and AI Studio product line. In this role, you will define and implement reference architectures for Data Engineering, Data Science, and the Data and AI Studio product, and drive their adoption across teams, while leading the shift from traditional Data Engineering and AI/ML practices to an AI agent–driven, accelerated development ecosystem. You will create capability and technology maps, innovation trend maps, architecture blueprints, and product positioning aligned with customer needs and the company’s overall strategy, ensuring consistent technology choices, enforcing architectural standards, and promoting reusability across products. This position demands a balance of visionary strategic thinking and direct engagement in technical problem-solving and delivery.

What will you do in the role:

Strategic Leadership

• Develop and maintain a cohesive architecture and product vision, aligning with MSD's business objectives and industry trends.
• Provide leadership to a team of engineers, mentoring and guiding them to achieve collective goals and deliverables.
• Foster a collaborative environment where innovation and best practices thrive.

Product Design and Integration

• Collaborate with product teams to design, develop, and integrate modular, scalable, and interoperable products.
• Oversee the creation and review of solution architectures to ensure alignment with organizational strategy.

Technology Leadership

• Drive the adoption of cutting-edge technologies and best practices, ensuring MSD remains competitive and innovative.
• Establish and govern architectural frameworks, standards, and guidelines to ensure consistency and quality.
• Architect, Design and Develop AI agents that would be playing the pivotal in the transformation of Engineering and Data Science development 

Framework Development and Governance

• Create capability and technology maps, reference architectures, innovation trend maps, and architecture blueprints and patterns.
• Ensure the consistent application of frameworks across product teams.

Hands-on Contribution

• Actively participate in technical problem-solving, proof-of-concept development, and implementation activities.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership to support your team and deliver high-value outcomes.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with enterprise, Core SnA architect and product architects to ensure alignment and synergy across the organization and declare technology standards
• Engage with stakeholders to align architectural decisions with broader business goals.

  What Should you have: 

• Proven leadership experience, including managing and mentoring technical teams.
• Deep technical expertise in data engineering, data management and governance, data science, data consumption and reporting, and cloud technologies (e.g., AWS, Databricks, Dataiku, Matillion, DBT, and Airflow).
• Strong understanding of data architecture principles, data modeling, and data integration techniques.
• Agentic AI development on a industry standard AI agent development platform
• Platform integration patterns, Metadata and governance integrations, API-Driven design, and Developer platform experience
• Experience integrating GenAI capabilities into broader data and analytics ecosystems to enhance insights, decision-making, and automation.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and stakeholder management skills.
• A passion for innovation, with a demonstrated ability to deliver exceptional results.
• Ability to balance strategic leadership with hands-on technical contributions.

 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 for life, 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 intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today. 

#HYDIT2026

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

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Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

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Job Posting End Date:

03/20/2026

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