Associate Director, Data Science

Job Description

Subject to applicable law, all prospective hires will be required to demonstrate that they have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 or intend to be vaccinated for COVID-19 by November 1, 2021, or qualify for a medical or religious accommodation to this vaccination requirement. Hired candidates who are not vaccinated by November 1, 2021, and who have not been approved for a legally-required medical or religious accommodation will be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment, subject to applicable law.

Our Digital team is innovating how we understand our patients and their needs. Working cross functionally we are inventing new ways of communicating, measuring and interacting with our customers and patients through digital channels and technologies.

The role involves working with our partners across the organization to help them create scalable and production-grade AI/ML products. You will be working with a scrum team comprising of data scientists, business analysts, data engineers, and subject matter experts to deliver well-defined projects. You will be tasked with designing and creating machine learning models and retraining systems. Often, you will have to take a model prototype built by a data scientist and work with the team to put that model in production. This will involve making the model scalable and efficient (parallelizing, using appropriate libraries, adding basic efficiencies from the code/data/architecture etc.). This can also entail building or rewriting the model from scratch. Creating a model governance architecture for retraining (upon drift) will also be your responsibility. In addition, creating the architecture/framework for performance evaluation and feedback loop will also be expected, prior to handover to ML Ops team.

Your model deployment will most likely be in the cloud, and we’ll look for the appropriate experience at your end. Some reporting and visualization skills will come in handy too. You don’t have to be an expert in any of these topics but need to be able to demonstrate aptitude and some experience. We will have some resources that you can leverage as needed. This role will require interfacing with executive teams so strong communication skills is a must. Experience with healthcare data is a plus. Healthcare data is sometimes unstructured and mostly in the form of text and images, so NLP and/or computer vision experience is preferred. We will look to your guidance for creating a technical roadmap for the project and exercise your leadership in executing it. Because this is a senior role, we are looking for someone with 5 years of experience in the data science/engineering space.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Build and overlook the competency of Global Data Science. Responsible for the performance of the overall organization, sets the strategy and priorities.

• Defines the roles with required competencies that would enable the delivery of Global complex data-analytical projects.

• Select analytical techniques and model methods best to solve business problems.

• Coach and mentor junior data scientists on the optimal approach to solve a problem, ensures best practices sharing and cross the organization.

• Manage the teams functionally in the matrix setup.

• Enable delivery of data-analytics projects. Have deep knowledge of the company's supported technology; understand the whole complexity/dependencies between multiple teams, platforms (people, technologies).

• Communicate intensively with other platform/competencies to comprehend new trends and methodologies being implemented/considered within the company ecosystem.

• Understands the customer/stakeholders business needs/priorities and helps building solutions that support our business goals.

• Establish and manages the close relationship with customers/stakeholders.

• Has overview of the DS market development to be able to come up/explore new ways of delivering analytics solutions to increase their value/contribution.

• Builds “community of practice” leveraging experience from delivering complex analytics projects.

• Is tactical and develops production-grade models while thinking strategically.

• Be accountable for ensuring that the team delivers solutions with high quality standards, timeliness, compliance and excellent user experience.

• Contribute to innovative experiments, specifically to idea generation, idea incubation and/or experimentation, identifying tangible and measurable criteria.

• Travel will be required (~20%)

Education Minimum Requirements:

• MS degree in Science, Engineering, Mathematics or related quantitative field

Required Experience and Skills:

• Minimum of 5-7 years of relevant delivery of complex analytical projects (industrialized, validated), minimum 2 years of relevant experience in the Healthcare industry.

• Minimum 3 years of professional experience in Applied Machine Learning, with at least 2 years on cloud environment (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Self-motivation, proactivity and ability to work independently with minimum direction Proven knowledge of business processes and industry/market trends within the pharmaceutical space.

• Excellent business acumen, with proven ability to understand business processes in detail – both at global and region/country levels – and translate these into user stories and detailed business requirements.

• Proven leadership and negotiation skills, along with good analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, along with the ability to communicate appropriately and confidently with colleagues from different backgrounds and seniority levels.

• Excellent organizational skills, with ability to navigate a complex matrix environment and organize/prioritize work efficiently and effectively.

• Hands-on experience writing production-grade ML code.

Preferred Experience and Skills:

Coding:

• Hands on coding experience in Python/R/Scala/Java or any other OOP; ETL using SQL/shell scripting.

• Experience in TensorFlow/Torch libraries; SageMaker, Databricks, MLflow Spark/distributed compute environment.

• Experience using cloud-based SQL & noSQL databases (Redshift, BQ, Athena, Mongo, so on).

Delivery:

• Experiences with project management and data analytics project delivery. Ability to communicate with business user/customer and with IT operations. Good overview of complex Data analytics solutions, ability to explain consequences to both IT and business.

Can be based partially remote.

DATA2020

#LI-Remote

Our Human Health Division maintains a “patient first, profits later” ideology. The organization is comprised of sales, marketing, market access, digital analytics and commercial professionals who are passionate about their role in bringing our medicines to our customers worldwide.

Who we are …

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, 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.

NOTICE FOR INTERNAL APPLICANTS

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.

If you have been offered a separation benefits package, but have not yet reached your separation date and are offered a position within the salary and geographical parameters as set forth in the Summary Plan Description (SPD) of your separation package, then you are no longer eligible for your separation benefits package. To discuss in more detail, please contact your HRBP or Talent Acquisition Advisor.

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Employee Status:

Relocation:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements:

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Shift:

Valid Driving License:

Hazardous Material(s):

Number of Openings:

Requisition ID:R142298