Associate Director, Commercial AI – Tech Lead

Merck Merck · Pharma · Telangana, India

Associate Director, Commercial AI – Tech Lead at Merck, responsible for defining and leading the technical vision, architecture, and engineering execution for AI and Agentic AI products. This role focuses on building and scaling enterprise-grade AI solutions, including LLM-powered and agent-based systems, from prototyping to production deployment, with a strong emphasis on LLMOps/MLOps, governance, scalability, and compliance within a regulated environment.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the reference architecture for Commercial AI + Agentic AI solutions, including patterns for RAG, orchestration, tool integration, identity, and observability across environments.
  2. Lead end-to-end delivery: discover → design → build → deploy → monitor → iterate; ensure production readiness (performance, reliability, security, cost).
  3. Engineer and ship agentic workflows (planning/reasoning, tool/function calling, reflection, memory patterns, guardrails) and harden them into enterprise-grade services.
  4. Establish LLMOps/MLOps operating practices: versioning/registry, automated evaluation, safe rollout/rollback, monitoring, and continuous improvement loops.
  5. Build and maintain reusable capabilities (templates, SDKs, integration patterns, deployment scaffolds) that accelerate delivery across multiple commercial products/teams.

Skills

Required

  • Designing multi-step agents with planning, tool/function calling, orchestration, and reflection loops
  • Implementing guardrails: policy enforcement, prompt injection defenses, tool-use constraints, HITL checkpoints, and safe fallbacks
  • Agent evaluation: task success scoring, trajectory analysis, tool-call accuracy, safety checks, and regression automation
  • Prompt engineering patterns, structured outputs, and reliability techniques
  • Deep practical knowledge of RAG: ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, reranking, context assembly, and grounding metrics
  • Understanding of embeddings and vector databases and how to tune retrieval for precision/recall in enterprise settings
  • Latency/cost optimization and observability for GenAI systems (tracing + cost controls + quality monitoring)
  • Integrating AI/agent services with enterprise applications/APIs, authentication/authorization, logging, and audit trails
  • Cloud-native engineering: containers, orchestration, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and reliability practices
  • Working knowledge of model governance: documentation, validation, monitoring, auditability, and human oversight suitable for regulated environments
  • Data privacy/security-by-design: access controls, encryption, secure secrets, and collaboration with InfoSec for audits and risk management
  • 8+ years in relevant experience across software engineering, ML engineering, MLOps/LLMOps

Nice to have

  • Awareness of fine-tuning approaches (when/why; trade-offs) and model selection strategies for regulated enterprise use
  • Experience with Enterprise AI engine – DataBricks AIBI, DataIku AI and Others
  • Ability to define reference architectures for commercial AI solutions and scalable design patterns for multiple products/markets
  • Masters (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline with strong focus on AI/ML and modern data systems.

What the JD emphasized

  • enterprise-grade
  • production readiness
  • agentic workflows
  • LLMOps/MLOps
  • governance
  • scalability
  • compliance
  • regulated environments

Other signals

  • building and scaling enterprise-grade AI solutions
  • LLM-powered and agent-based systems
  • rapid prototyping through production deployment
  • LLMOps/MLOps
  • governance, scalability, and compliance