Lab Platform Engineer

Job Description

## About the Role

We run the enterprise SaaS platforms, APIs, and data integrations that our research and manufacturing organisation depends on every day. When they break, science stops. You will be the engineer who owns a set of those platforms end to end: reliability, incidents, integrations, automation, and technical

direction.

This is a hands-on reliability and platform engineering role, not a ticket

queue. You will own production, run the post-incident reviews, automate the manual work away, and decide where the platform goes next. Our platforms happen to serve laboratory and sample-management workflows, so you will learn that domain here - we do not expect you to arrive with it.

## What You Will Do

### Own production

• Act as technical owner for a portfolio of business-critical SaaS platforms and the integrations around them.
• Lead investigation and resolution of production incidents across application, API, data, identity, and network layers.
• Run blameless post-incident reviews, drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions to closure.
• Improve monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and operational metrics so the next incident is shorter - or does not happen.

### Engineer and integrate

• Build and maintain integrations between SaaS platforms, internal enterprise services, and legacy systems.
• Debug data-consistency and integration failures across APIs, event flows, and identity boundaries.
• Use AWS services and enterprise networking knowledge to diagnose and harden platform reliability.
• Support deployments, go-live readiness, rollback planning, and post-deployment stabilisation.

### Automate and use AI well

• Automate repetitive operational work - triage, checks, reporting, provisioning - with scripting and approved tooling.
• Use AI-assisted tooling for log analysis, incident triage, investigation, and knowledge capture, and validate its output against real platform evidence before acting on it.

### Set technical direction

• Prioritise technical work with product owners, and communicate risk, impact, and options to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
• Contribute to target-state architecture and technical roadmaps for your platforms.
• Lead technical engagement with vendors on incidents, defects, enhancements, and upgrades.
• Mentor less experienced engineers and contribute to engineering standards and documentation.

### Work in a regulated environment

Follow established validation, change-control, and documentation practices - our platforms are audit-sensitive, and we will train you on what that means in practice.

Identify security, access, and data-protection risks early and bring in security and architecture partners.

## What You Bring

• 4+ years engineering, operating, or owning production software platforms, SaaS solutions, or enterprise systems.
• Real production incident experience: you have been on the sharp end of an outage, led the investigation, and closed the loop afterwards.
• Solid debugging skills across the stack - application, API, data, identity, and network.
• Working knowledge of AWS and of enterprise networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, firewalls, proxies, connectivity patterns).
• Scripting or development ability (Python or similar) for automation.
• Practical use of AI-assisted tools in engineering or operations work, with sound judgement about their output.
• Clear written and spoken English, and the ability to work with distributed teams across Europe, the US, and India.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a life sciences field (biology, chemistry, biotechnology, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, or similar) - or equivalent practical experience. We welcome scientists who moved into engineering.

## Nice to Have (Not Required)

We will teach you the domain. Any of the following is a bonus, none is a

filter:

• Observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, Splunk, CloudWatch or similar).
• Infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, or containers.
• Experience in a regulated, GxP, or otherwise audit-sensitive environment.
• Scientific informatics platforms - LIMS, ELN, sample management - or specific products such as Benchling or ZONTAL.
• Awareness of IT/OT boundaries, network segmentation, and the Purdue Model / ISA-95 concepts used in laboratory and plant environments.
• Life sciences, pharma, research, or manufacturing IT background.

## Why This Role

• End-to-end ownership of platforms that directly enable drug discovery and development.
• A reliability practice you get to shape, not inherit fully formed.
• Genuine mandate to automate and to apply AI tooling to operations work.
• Prague-based team working closely with US and India engineering.

## What we offer

• Exciting work in a great team, global projects, international environment
• Opportunity to learn and grow professionally within the company globally
• Hybrid working model, flexible role pattern
• Competitive salary & incentive pay
• Pension and health insurance contributions
• Internal reward system and referral scheme
• 5 weeks annual leave, 5 sick days, 15 days of certified sick leave paid above statutory requirements annually, 40 paid hours annually for volunteering activities, 12 weeks of parental contribution
• Cafeteria for tax free benefits according to your choice (meal vouchers, sport, culture, health, travel, etc.), Multisport Card
• Vodafone, Raiffeisen Bank, Foodora, and discount programmes
• Up-to-date laptop and iPhone
• Parking in the garage, showers, refreshments, massage chairs, library, music corner

Ready to take up the challenge? Apply now! Know anybody who might be interested? Refer this job!

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

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.

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