Sr. Scientist Data Science & Informatics

Key Skills

Python Programming, AWS, Deep Learning, MATLAB Programming, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery - CI/CD, IT Security, R Programming, Databricks, Computer Vision (CV), Natural Language Understanding-NLU, Internet of Things- IoT

Job Description

New hires in office-based roles in the US & Puerto Rico will be required, subject to applicable law, to demonstrate that they have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 or qualify for a medical or religious exemption to this vaccination requirement that can be accommodated without an undue burden to the operation. However, subject to applicable law, employees working in roles that the Company determines require routine collaboration with external stakeholders, such as employees in health services, customer facing commercial, or research based roles, will be required to be fully vaccinated as a condition of employment.

An opportunity has arisen for a Sr. Scientist position the Data Science and Informatics group in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Organization. The role will be essential in ensuring our organizations realization of our digital transformation, and to provide centralized support and data science expertise to teams across the Pharmaceutical Sciences organization of our company's Research Labs. Our projects focus on key areas of interest to multiple teams: bleeding edge research and experimentation, common tool and platform development, and establishing best practices to ensure the scientific community at our Research Division is well-positioned to rapidly meet the challenges of modern R&D, and make an impact on an entire scientific culture at our company.

As our project scope is vast, we incubate a number of ML and AI projects, as well as collaborating on larger projects across our Research Division, in many areas including advanced predictive modelling, computer vision, natural language processing, and more. Our group excels in the ‘how’ of data science – how to write repeatable code, how to train a model continuously, and how to package and deploy it into a production system. You will be responsible for setting the scientific strategy for many of these ‘how’s, tactically engaging with key groups of business and IT to determine the mechanics of training and deploying models, and working with our platform teams to build or adopt repeatable tools and packages.

In this role you will work with a diverse group of scientists and engineers to broadly shape and lead how we train, package, investigate, and deploy machine learning models and other data science artifacts at our Research Division. You will apply state of the art data science technology platforms to build and deploy operational solutions that span the scientific, executional, compliance, and operations spaces. Your responsibilities include developing models for equipment, material, modality/formulation, and product and formulation specific analytics. Responsibilities also including automation of analysis, data acquisition, workflow builds and deployment of hands-free methods. To enable ML and AI, you will also lead machine vision for object detection, activity recognition, and defect detection. Solutions for resource optimization, scheduling, and forecasting, maintenance, alarms diagnosis, asset management, and develop models to explore what if scenarios are all in scope of this role.

Reporting into the Pharmaceutical Operations and Clinical Supplies Organization (POCS) the successful candidate will bring energy, knowledge, innovation to carry out the following:

• Lead Interactions with the scientific and operations functions to identify, catalogue, develop and characterize use cases and value generating data science opportunities for the respective business areas.
• Evaluate, prioritize, and plan the staged execution of data science projects. 
• Manage a portfolio of data science projects using agile methodologies. 
• Independently and in teams build, test, and deploy end to end data science solutions. 
• Serve as a subject matter expert on data science, data engineering, and machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistical analysis.
• Build, develop, and grow the data science capabilities for both our data science staff and our functional area scientific staff via training, coaching, and mentoring.
• Drive and support a self-service data science mindset in our organization. 
• Deliver on the organizational initiatives and projects and against quality-based metrics: e.g. deviation; change controls, technical reports, and global regulatory submissions.
• Help operationalize numerous models across the organization, provide guidance and training to DS and engineers alike
• Set the standard with IT for applied machine learning at our Research Division.

 In order to excel in this role, you will more than likely have:

• A PhD with a minimum of 1 years’ experience, MSc with a minimum of 4 years of experience or BSc with a minimum of 6 years of experience in academia, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, or physical sciences-based company
• Education and or related experience in the physical sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, Material Sciences, pharmaceutical sciences).
• Demonstrated experience with the mechanics of training and deploying ML models, as well as other aspects of the Data Science lifecycle, such as scheduling, CI/CD, cluster computing, server less architectures, etc.
• Broad knowledge of machine learning and statistics, with the ability to deep dive as well as converse at high technical level with architects and senior scientists. NLP/NLU, Computer Vision, and other deep learning experience a plus.
• Expertise in cloud-based IT solution building and architecture design. Advanced working knowledge of cloud-based technology stacks (AWS, Databricks). AWS Certified is preferred.
• Expertise in data engineering, data science, Machine Learning, and statistical modeling and analysis, and coding (Advanced Python and related programming skills R, Matlab, …)
• Expertise in IoT, security, connected data (graph), BI, microservice, and UI/UX design elements.
• Experience of team building, people management and personnel development/coaching, directing or managing small to medium projects and teams, with ability to give effective training and presentations to DS and engineers.
• Experience bridging the gap between engineering and data science groups, with clear understanding of setting group goals and delivering on business targets.
• Exposure with pharmaceutical formulation development, and characterization is a plus.
• Working knowledge of statistical methods for DOE design, hypothesis testing, regression analysis, classification, and exploratory data analysis

As a company, we are committed to ‘Inventing for Life’ in all that we do. We keep the patient at the very heart of all that we do and strive to find solutions and treatments for some of the world’s most challenging healthcare needs. We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing diverse, talented, and committed people together.

If you like a rich set of varied responsibilities, with tremendous exposure and impact within a large organization, this is a role for you! If you are ready to:

Invent solutions to meet unmet healthcare needs, please apply today. 

We are a research-driven biopharmaceutical company. Our mission is built on the simple premise that if we “follow the science” that great medicines can make a significant impact to our world. We believe that a research-driven enterprise dedicated to world-class science can succeed by inventing medicine and vaccine innovations that make a difference for patients across the globe.

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 among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.