Associate Director, Technical Architecture

Job Description

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

The Principal Architect, Network Observability & AI will join the Data Insights and Visualization team to contribute to the intersection of business intelligence (BI), telemetry visualization, and modern artificial intelligence. This role will contribute to the development of generative, conversational, and agentic AI capabilities into our existing telemetry platforms and new initiatives. By exploiting the advanced features of our commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) tools alongside custom, home-grown solutions, you will transform raw network data into immediate, actionable insights for our business and operational value teams.

What will you do in this role

• Architect unified dashboard platforms that convert complex telemetry into simplified, AI-driven visual scores for leadership and operational teams.

• Design, build and deliver end-to-end telemetry analytics and interactive dashboards that combine network flow, metrics, logs, traces, and business context to reduce time-to-insight and time-to-resolution.

• Design, build and deliver high-throughput telemetry pipelines that correlate multi-vendor syslog, SNMP, streaming telemetry, and VPC flow logs into cohesive telemetry lakes.

• Develop agentic AI agents and AIOps components that continuously analyze streaming telemetry to detect anomalies, and surface proactive recommendations to stakeholders.

• Embed AI-driven insights into visualizations and web applications so executives, product leaders, SREs and network engineers receive role-appropriate, actionable views.

• Build reusable visualization components, templates, and libraries to support routers, switches, firewalls, wireless, SD-WAN, and core application observability.

• Contribute to telemetry data quality improvement, and performance measurement initiatives for critical network components.

• Provide technical mentoring and project leadership to local peers.

Primary skills (must-have):

• Strong communicator who can translate technical analysis into clear, concise presentations for peers, managers, and executives.

• Strategic architectural mindset with deep technical expertise in multi-source correlation, and a proven track record of mentoring engineering teams on pipeline construction.

• Collaborative team player able to coordinate cross-functional work and deliver on time.

Primary skills (must-have):

• Exposure to large global network infrastructures (routers, switches, LAN, SD-WAN, firewalls, wireless).

• 6+ years leading network monitoring, network telemetry, or network observability project using tools such as LogicMonitor, Thousand Eyes, Big Panda, Dynatrace, NetBrain, Grafana Cloud, Zscaler ZDX, or similar.

• Subject expertise and experience working as primary contributor on projects with Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks, or building conversational interfaces (chatbots) that translate user intent into structured queries (SQL, API calls, or platform-specific query languages).

• 6+ years architecting enterprise-scale network monitoring or observability architectures, integrating network telemetry platforms with IT Service Management (ServiceNow API) and incident correlation engines.

• 6+ years building observability and data normalization across complex telemetry types (logs, metrics, traces, flows) and proactive alerting/AIOps integration.

• 8+ years developing complex multi-source data pipelines using data engineering tools such as Dataiku, Databricks.

• Proven experience building actionable dashboards and role-based views for executives, product owners, and engineers.

• Experience embedding visualizations in web applications and building reusable visualization components.

• Proficiency with one or more general-purpose programming languages and web frameworks: JavaScript (React/Vue), Python (Django/Flask), Java, or similar.

• 4-year college degree majoring in Computer Science, Telecommunications, Business Intelligence, or similar.

Secondary skills (nice to have)

· Engineer or specialist level developer certifications (AWS, Python, SQL) or equivalent hands-on experience.

· Familiarity integrating agents with ITSM/incident platforms (ServiceNow or similar) and network automation tools (Ansible, or similar).

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 , 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.

Additional location(s) Compensation Information:

Required Skills:

AI Ops, AI Ops, Chatbots, Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Software, Computer Science, Databricks Unified Data Analytics Platform, Data Engineering, Data Normalization, Data Pipelines, Emerging Technologies, JavaScript, Large Language Models (LLMs), Mentorship, Methods and Tools, Network Automation, Network Monitoring, Programming Languages, Project Leadership, Query Language, Requirements Management, ServiceNow Platform, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, Strategic Planning {+ 4 more}

Preferred Skills:

Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Insights

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Secondary Language(s) Job Description:

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:

Domestic

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

No Travel Required

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

Job Posting End Date:

11/16/2026

*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.