Senior Specialist, DevOps Engineer

Senior Specialist, DevOps Engineer 

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 companys’ 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 

Our IT team operates as a business partner, proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver the services and solutions that help R&D global users be more productive and enable innovation. 

The Senior Specialist, DevOps Engineer , will be a critical enabler of company’s product— a portfolio of AI-powered, enterprise-integrated solutions that support regulatory document authoring, machine translation, and the regulatory document lifecycle. This role sits at the intersection of software delivery, cloud infrastructure, and operational excellence, ensuring that our generative AI applications, data pipelines, and enterprise integrations are reliably built, deployed, monitored, and sustained at scale. 

You will be a founding member of the company  DevOps capability, helping establish DevOps as a core organizational discipline within the product line. You will work closely with software engineers, data scientists, technical architects, and product managers across globally distributed squads — including teams delivering iRAP -PSN, DT-GPTeal (Machine Translation), VSMT, and ARC Phase 2 (Veeva Vault) — to build and operate a secure, scalable, and compliant delivery platform. 

What Will You Do in This Role 

Platform Engineering & CI/CD 

• Design, implement, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent) to support continuous delivery of applications across the DRD product line. 

• Automate build, test, packaging, and deployment workflows for full-stack applications (React.js, Node.js, Python/FastAPI) and AI/ML model artefacts. 

• Establish and enforce branching strategies, release management practices, and deployment gates aligned with GxP and regulated environment requirements. 

• Support formalisation of release management practices as a core DRD engineering discipline. 

Cloud Infrastructure & Operations 

• Provision, manage, and optimise cloud infrastructure on AWS using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation. 

• Manage container orchestration using Kubernetes and Docker, ensuring high availability, scalability, and security of deployed services. 

• Operate and maintain environments (development, staging, production) for AI-powered applications including LLM-based authoring tools and machine translation services. 

• Support the ARC Phase 2 programme by enabling infrastructure for Veeva Vault integrations, upstream/downstream application connectivity, and data migration pipelines. 

MLOps & AI Application Operations 

• Build and maintain MLOps workflows for generative AI applications — including model versioning, CI/CD for models, inference infrastructure, and monitoring for model drift and performance degradation. 

• Support deployment and operationalisation of GenAI solutions (RAG pipelines, LLM-based agents, embedding services) in collaboration with AI engineers and data scientists. 

• Ensure reproducibility, auditability, and compliance of model training and inference pipelines in regulated (GxP-aware) environments. 

Observability, Reliability & Security 

• Implement and maintain observability stacks — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — to ensure operational visibility across all DRD applications and services. 

• Enable data lineage and observability capabilities in alignment with CDDS 2026 priorities. 

• Enforce security best practices including secrets management, role-based access control (RBAC), vulnerability scanning, and compliance with enterprise security standards. 

• Proactively identify and remediate operational risks, performance bottlenecks, and infrastructure technical debt. 

Governance, Standards & Collaboration 

• Collaborate with the CDDS Architecture team to ensure infrastructure and delivery practices align with enterprise architectural standards, guiding principles, and the Technology Assessment process. 

• Contribute to the Architecture Community of Practice by maintaining versioned infrastructure roadmaps and participating in solution design reviews. 

• Partner with Technical Architects and Engineering Leads to identify and remediate technical debt in infrastructure and delivery pipelines. 

• Establish and track DevOps KPIs and operational metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate) to demonstrate continuous improvement. 

• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to building DevOps capability and culture within the DRD product line. 

What Should You Have 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or any Technology stream, or equivalent relevant experience. 
• 7+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Platform Engineering roles. 
• Strong hands-on experience with CI/CD pipeline design and implementation (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalent). 

• Proficiency in container technologies: Docker and Kubernetes (EKS or equivalent managed Kubernetes). 

• Solid experience with AWS cloud services: EC2, EKS, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, and related services. 

• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or equivalent. 

• Proficiency in scripting languages: Python, Bash, or PowerShell for automation and tooling. 

• Experience with observability and monitoring tools: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, or equivalent. 

• Familiarity with MLOps practices: model CI/CD, model registry, experiment tracking (MLflow, SageMaker, or equivalent). 

• Strong understanding of security best practices: secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), RBAC, vulnerability scanning, and network security. 

• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows. 

• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments with cross-functional, globally distributed teams. 

• Strong communication skills, analytical mindset, and ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams. 

Preferred Qualifications and Skills 

• Experience in pharma, clinical, regulatory, or pharmacovigilance domains and familiarity with GxP-compliant delivery practices. 

• Experience supporting AI/GenAI application operations — including LLM inference infrastructure, RAG pipelines, vector databases, and embedding services. 

• Familiarity with Veeva Vault platform integrations or enterprise content management system migrations. 

• Experience with machine translation platforms or NLP pipeline operations. 

• AWS certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect). 

• Experience with release management formalisation and operational framework maturity in regulated environments. 

• Familiarity with enterprise architecture governance processes and technology assessment frameworks. 

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. 

#HYDIT2025