Associate Director - DevOps

Job Description

APEX DevOps Associate Director

As the APEX DevOps Associate Director, you will lead DevOps strategy, continuous delivery, and platform automation within our APEX (AI, Process, and EXperience) organization. In this high-impact leadership role, you will champion a modern, AI-augmented engineering culture—driving enterprise CI/CD pipelines, release orchestration, and developer enablement across a dynamic technology landscape in support of our mission to deliver innovative health solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• APEX DevOps Strategy & Vision: Define, govern, and execute the enterprise DevOps roadmap tailored for APEX (AI, Process, and EXperience) initiatives, accelerating delivery velocity, quality, and platform resilience across global product squads.
• AI-Augmented Engineering & Modern Practices: Foster an AI-native operational culture across the engineering organization, leveraging AI coding assistants, automated test generation, and agentic workflows to streamline deployment pipelines and enhance developer productivity.
• Executive Alignment & Value Realization: Prepare and present executive summaries, capability roadmaps, and delivery metrics (such as DORA metrics and deployment lead times) to senior leadership, demonstrating operational resilience, efficiency, and continuous business value.
• Stakeholder & Engineering Collaboration: Partner closely with software engineering, and Product teams to align DevOps frameworks with day-to-day agile execution, serving as the primary senior escalation point for release and delivery operations.
• Release Orchestration & Governance: Define and enforce automated release governance, continuous delivery patterns, and blue/green or canary deployment strategies to ensure secure, compliant, zero-downtime releases across enterprise applications.
• Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Champion Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and pipeline automation (GitHub Actions), eliminating manual toil, establishing self-service developer environments, and enforcing standardization.
• Team Leadership & Culture: Direct, coach, and inspire a global team of DevOps and platform engineers, fostering continuous experimentation, engineering excellence, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Financial & Resource Stewardship: Manage the squad’s operational budget, software licenses, and cloud capacity planning, building clear business cases for strategic tooling and platform investments.
• Vendor & Tooling Ecosystem Governance: Direct partnerships with key technology and DevOps tool providers, standardizing toolsets, tracking SLAs, and maximizing ROI across the APEX development ecosystem.
• DevSecOps, Compliance & Observability: Embed automated security scans, compliance-as-code guardrails, and full-stack observability (tracing, latency, application performance, and system health) into pipelines to meet stringent healthcare regulatory standards.
• Pragmatic Hands-On Leadership: Maintain deep technical fluency, readily engaging with engineering squads to troubleshoot pipeline failures, refine deployment architectures, and unblock critical path deliverables.

Qualifications

Required

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience: Minimum of 7+ years of progressive technical leadership experience in DevOps, Cloud Platform Delivery, and Release Management, including demonstrated success directly managing, mentoring, and scaling high-performing technical squads.
• AI-Native Mindset: Practical familiarity with adopting modern AI developer tooling, AI coding assistants, and agentic workflows to accelerate delivery, optimize workflows, and drive operational efficiency.
• Cloud & Automation Engineering: Advanced technical proficiency with AWS core services (IAM, VPC, EKS/ECS, Lambda, Load Balancing, KMS) and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• CI/CD & Modern DevOps Tooling: Proven track record designing and maintaining enterprise-scale CI/CD pipelines utilizing GitHub, GitHub Actions, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern artifact repositories.
• Budgetary & Strategic Management: Demonstrated capability to oversee squad operational budgets, forecast cloud/tooling expenditures, and present strategic business cases to senior executive stakeholders.
• Communication & Executive Presence: Outstanding verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to translate complex DevOps architectures and delivery strategies into executive-ready narratives.

 Preferred

• Industry Certifications: Relevant certifications in AWS (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer), DevOps methodologies, or enterprise platforms (Salesforce / Veeva).
• Regulated Environment Experience: Hands-on experience implementing DevSecOps, automated policy-as-code, and compliance guardrails within a regulated healthcare, life sciences, or GxP environment.
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Solid grounding in Site Reliability Engineering principles, error budgeting, and telemetry platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Dynatrace).

Required Skills:

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Artifact Cataloging, Artificial Intelligence Software, Computer Science, Deployment Strategies, DevOps, DevSecOps, Dynatrace APM, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Health Care Regulation, Information Technology (IT), Infrastructure As Code (IaC), Operational Resilience, Orchestration (Computing), Pragmatics, Release Management, Site Reliability Engineering, Stewardship, Terraform (Software)

Preferred Skills:

Capacity Management, Change Controls, Configuration Management (CM), Network Design, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, System Administration, System Integration

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities. Please click here if you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process.

As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.  As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.  For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:

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We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another’s thinking and approach problems collectively.

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The primary location for this posting is:

USA - New Jersey - Rahway

Where required by law, the compensation range for this role is provided below.

The salary range for the primary location of this role is:

$142,400.00 - $224,100.00

This range reflects the Company's reasonable expectation of the base salary applicable to this role at the time of posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, government requirements, and business or organizational needs. The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits. Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. More information about benefits is available at https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.

Additional location(s): Please note the salary range above applies to the Primary Location of the position. Where a role has other listed locations, different compensation guidelines may apply. You may find the salary ranges for additional locations below. If the salary range is not listed for the location you are applying to, our Talent Acquisition team will provide further information to you relevant to your location.

Additional location(s) Compensation Information:

San Francisco Residents Only: We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

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:

Not Applicable

Shift:

Valid Driving License:

Hazardous Material(s):

Job Posting End Date:

11/27/2026

*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.