Associate Director of Engineering, Foundational Automation

Job Description

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 everyone to be more productive and enable innovation.

The Associate Director of Engineering is an important leadership role within the Foundational Automation (FA) Organization and is responsible for leading a team of Engineers as well as Engineering managers; providing technical leadership, driving overall delivery of automations, fostering engagement, retention, and employee growth.

This role will play a significant role in establishing a truly world class engineering function within FA. They will provide input into the foundation for the evolution of FA's Engineering strategy as well as executing the strategy; evolving the tactical RPA capability to an enterprise-scale intelligent automation function.

They will be responsible for elevating the standard of engineering within their teams to establish a sustainable capability that delivers state-of-the-art automation. The role will play a critical part in helping to establish and enforce design and coding standards and building a team that has the skills to deliver against those standards. They will provide direction for the team and empower innovation to drive the next generation of automation capabilities.

The Associate Director of Engineering will initially have direct reports consisting of 2- 3 Tech Leads and have responsibility for 2-5 Scrum masters. This team may grow as the organization evolves.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Solution Leadership

The role will provide thought leadership, oversight, and direction to Tech Leads for the technical solution design of created within their teams. These solutions will be aligned with CTO architecture guidelines and policies, as well as leverage the established FA platform capabilities. They will ensure maximization of reuse by assessing all development for reusability and ensuring all designs prioritize the reuse of existing components. This role is directly accountable for the effectiveness of the solution design as well as maximizing efficiency of infrastructure resource usage, maintainability, and reliability. They are accountable for minimizing bad technical debt and maximizing leverage and alignment with existing tech solutions owned by divisional IT. To this end they will remain current on all new technology releases and architecture best practices.

Technical Quality

This role is accountable for the quality of output from their engineering teams. They are accountable for ensuring that engineering managers and tech leads are maintaining compliance to coding standards and quality expectations. They will provide thought leadership in test-driven development and quality assurance approaches to optimize efficiency and ensure quality outcomes. They are expected to be a hands-on technical leader able to review code to identify quality risks before they manifest in production.

Team Leadership

This role will lead teams of engineers and Engineering Managers with a range of skills (RPA, OCR, ML, full stack, cloud, etc.). They will be responsible for designing, establishing, and sustaining an engineering team that: has the relevant range of skills, is flexible in deployment of a range of efforts, and is adaptable to innovative technologies as they evolve. This will involve recruiting, assessing, and hiring the talent required, and then retaining and growing that talent. They will be accountable for inspiring the team and maintaining a high level of engagement across the group. They will be required to encourage innovation to continuously improve FA capabilities and drive impactful solutions to the business. They will be an inclusive servant leader who operates seamlessly across multiple locations (USA, Prague, Singapore, China, etc.) and encourages and respects diversity; including diversity of culture and thought. The Associate Director of Engineering will manage both employees and contractors and is accountable for ensuring a collaborative and effective working environment for both while complying with all terms of contracts and regulations pertaining to contractors. This role will be remote and will lead remote teams and as such requires the ability to lead, inspire, manage, and engage teams using digital tools for direction and communication to maximize performance and inclusion. · Delivery This role will be accountable for the on-time, under-budget, and in-scope delivery of delivered by their teams. They will oversee the accurate estimating of effort (story points) and ensure that scrum team commitments to delivery per sprint are met. They will work with scrum masters to ensure maximum utilization of engineers and drive velocity and throughput as a priority. They will work with engineering managers to ensure that engineer assignments balance the application of their best skills with the opportunity to grow and expand skills. · Collaboration The Associate Director of Engineering will be an adept collaborator, able to engage the right resources outside their immediate team effectively and ensure a frictionless partnership with relevant parties. They will work closely with their FA peers to ensure technical alignment and facilitate interactions for engineers between their teams. They will collaborate with FA engagement leads to partner with the relevant business stakeholders to ensure solution fit. They will partner with the FA platform team to maximize the leverage of platform capabilities and contribute to innovations and the evolution of the platform by means of lessons learned in delivery of project, ideas for new capabilities and even reusable modules created during delivery.

Skills

• Proficient in a large mix of RPA (UiPath), OCR, full stack (C#, Java, Python, React), SQL, various ML models, CI/CD tools and practices, APIs, data and event streaming technologies

• Proficient in cloud computing, infrastructure as code, cloud-native principles & microservices design

• Highly capable problem solver able to map the best technology available to the business needs in an elegant comprehensive solution design

• Effective communicator able to gain alignment, ensure clarity, and explain complex principles

• Able to manage a complex engineering organizational that adapts and scales to the business need Capable technical mentor and career guide

• Ability to understand technical demands of a solution and map the relevant engineer skills to ensure optimal assignments across diverse teams and initiatives

Experience

• The ideal candidate will have at least 10 years of experience in roles of increasing responsibility beginning with code-level engineer roles and culminating in a solution lead and/or technical mentor position.

• 8+ years of track of record in delivering effective engineering solutions in a complex, international company with a geographically dispersed team of at least 50 engineers, with a mix of both hands-on developer experience and solution design.

• Expertise in core competency areas such as RPA, ML, full stack, and technical design

• Experience with technical oversight of a team of at least 20 engineers in multiple countries

• Extensive use of agile product development methodologies and DevOps tools

Education Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in computer science, statistics, engineering, mathematics, data science, or a related field

Our Support Functions deliver services and make recommendations about ways to enhance our workplace and the culture of our organization. Our Support Functions include HR, Finance, Information Technology, Legal, Procurement, Administration, Facilities and Security.

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.

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In accordance with Managers' Policy - Job Posting and Employee Placement, all employees subject to this policy are required to have a minimum of twelve (12) months of service in current position prior to applying for open positions.

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Requisition ID:R219868