Technical Lead

Job Description

R401144 Technical Lead, Context Serving, Data context Layer

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 company’s 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

This role is part of a broader enterprise initiative to establish a Data Context Layer (DCL) — a foundational capability designed to provide consistent, reusable, and scalable context across enterprise data products.

The DCL is intended to address challenges related to data fragmentation, lack of shared semantics, and inconsistent interpretation of data across systems and products. It establishes a unified layer for representing context, relationships, and meaning, enabling downstream products to operate with greater consistency, interoperability, and intelligence.

In addition, the DCL plays a critical role in enabling agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise by providing the structured context and semantic grounding required for intelligent agents to operate reliably. This includes ensuring that agent-driven workflows and decisions are based on consistent, governed, and interpretable data context, reducing risks associated with fragmentation, ambiguity, and lack of control.

Within this initiative, we are seeking a Technical Lead to design and deliver the data and semantic pipelines that populate and maintain our enterprise knowledge graph and context-serving layer. This role is responsible for building the technical foundation that ingests, transforms, validates, and publishes structured context from enterprise sources into reusable semantic and graph-based assets.

The ideal candidate has strong experience in data engineering, pipeline architecture, knowledge graph population, and semantic technologies, with familiarity in ontologies, OWL, RDF, agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering. This is a highly technical role focused on making context reliable, current, and production-ready for downstream consumption by applications, APIs, and AI/agentic systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and implementation of pipelines that extract, transform, validate, and load context into the knowledge graph and semantic layer.
• Define pipeline patterns for:
  • source ingestion
  • mapping and transformation
  • entity resolution
  • semantic enrichment
  • validation and quality checks
  • incremental updates and synchronization
• Partner with ontology, architecture, data engineering, and platform teams to ensure pipeline outputs align with semantic standards and enterprise context models.
• Build scalable and maintainable processes for knowledge graph population from multiple enterprise data sources.
• Establish technical standards for data contracts, transformation logic, lineage, versioning, monitoring, and failure handling.
• Ensure context pipelines support both batch and near-real-time needs where appropriate.
• Collaborate with platform teams to make context available through APIs, services, and agent-ready interfaces.
• Support the operational readiness of pipelines, including observability, testing, alerting, recovery, and deployment automation.
• Evaluate and apply technologies and patterns such as RDF/OWL stacks, semantic ETL, knowledge graph tools, timbr-like platforms, and context orchestration approaches.
• Help ensure pipeline-produced context improves grounding for AI and agentic use cases, including prompt quality and context reliability.
• Work with stakeholders to prioritize source onboarding, modeling requirements, and production hardening efforts.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, pipeline engineering, technical architecture, or related platform roles.
• Strong experience building scalable data pipelines and integration workflows.
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs, ontologies, RDF, OWL, semantic enrichment, and entity modeling.
• Experience with data quality, validation, lineage, versioning, and operational monitoring.
• Working knowledge of agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering concepts.
• Ability to translate semantic and data requirements into implementable pipeline designs.
• Strong hands-on technical skills and experience working closely with engineers and architects.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with knowledge graph population tools, semantic ETL frameworks, or timbr-like technologies.
• Background in metadata management, master data, data virtualization, or enterprise integration.
• Experience supporting AI-enabled or context-driven applications.
• Familiarity with batch, streaming, and event-driven integration patterns.
• Experience with data governance, security, and production support in enterprise environments.
• Knowledge of CI/CD, orchestration tools, and observability platforms for data pipelines.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means:

• context pipelines are reliable, scalable, and easy to maintain
• knowledge graph population is consistent with enterprise semantic standards
• source data can be onboarded efficiently and repeatedly
• context remains current, validated, and production-ready
• downstream APIs, applications, and AI systems receive high-quality grounding data
• the pipeline layer becomes a trusted foundation for enterprise context services

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.

Required Skills:

Context Mapping, Data Engineering, Data Governance, Data Virtualization, Data Visualization, Design Applications, Enterprise Data, Enterprise Systems Integration, Knowledge Graph, Master Data Management (MDM), Metadata Management, Pipeline Management, Piping Engineering, Production Support, Prompt Engineering, Software Configurations, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, System Designs, System Integration, Testing

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Secondary Language(s) Job Description:

#MSDHYDIT

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:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

No Travel Required

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Not Applicable

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

Job Posting End Date:

08/28/2026

*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.