Associate Director, Commercial AI – Tech Lead

MSD


Job Location:

Pune - India

Monthly Salary: Not Disclosed
Posted on: 10 hours ago
Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

Job Description

Associate Director Commercial AI Tech Lead Digital Human Health

Job Description

This role sits within the Commercial AI vertical of Digital Human Health (DHH) which is responsible for building and scaling AI capabilities across cross-functional teams and divisions. The team operates as an embedded strategic partner to the commercial organization providing thought leadership and delivering AI-powered solutions to marketing and cross-functional stakeholders. It shapes demand by translating business priorities into scalable AI products and agent-driven solutions that enhance decision-making and drive measurable business impact.

Role Overview

As the Associate Director Commercial AI Tech Lead you will define and lead the technical vision architecture and engineering execution for AI and Agentic AI products supporting our companys Commercial use cases in India. You will play a pivotal role in building and scaling enterprise-grade AI solutions including LLM-powered and agent-based systems from rapid prototyping through production will establish robust engineering foundations including reusable frameworks SDKs and best practices across LLMOps/MLOps while ensuring governance scalability and compliance. This role requires close collaboration with commercial stakeholders product and program leaders enterprise architecture and risk security and privacy teams to deliver impactful business-aligned solutions.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own the reference architecture for Commercial AI Agentic AI solutions including patterns for RAG orchestration tool integration identity and observability across environments.
  • Lead end-to-end delivery: discover design build deploy monitor iterate; ensure production readiness (performance reliability security cost).
  • Engineer and ship agentic workflows (planning/reasoning tool/function calling reflection memory patterns guardrails) and harden them into enterprise-grade services.
  • Establish LLMOps/MLOps operating practices: versioning/registry automated evaluation safe rollout/rollback monitoring and continuous improvement loops.
  • Build and maintain reusable capabilities (templates SDKs integration patterns deployment scaffolds) that accelerate delivery across multiple commercial products/teams.
  • Drive governance and risk controls in partnership with security/privacy/legal: responsible AI data privacy auditability human-in-the-loop controls and policy-based enforcement where needed.
  • Implement evaluation & quality frameworks for LLM/agent systems (offline online) including guardrail testing prompt/retrieval regression tests and business KPI alignment.
  • Own observability for AI services: tracing across prompt retrieval/tool calls response cost/usage dashboards incident triage postmortems and reliability improvements.
  • Optimize latency quality and cost trade-offs through caching prompt/RAG tuning model routing and systematic performance benchmarking.
  • Partner with business/product leaders to translate commercial problems into well-scoped AI roadmaps measurable outcomes and scalable platform components.
  • Ensure solutions align with SDLC validation expectations appropriate for regulated environments; embed documentation and controls into delivery.
  • Mentor and lead engineers/data scientists: design reviews coding standards coaching hiring input and building a high-performing delivery culture.

Technical Expertise

Agentic AI

  • Hands-on experience designing multi-step agents with planning tool/function calling orchestration and reflection loops.
  • Strong understanding of memory patterns (short-term long-term episodic) grounding strategies and failure-mode handling (loops hallucinations tool errors).
  • Ability to implement guardrails: policy enforcement prompt injection defenses tool-use constraints HITL checkpoints and safe fallbacks.
  • Expertise in agent evaluation: task success scoring trajectory analysis tool-call accuracy safety checks and regression automation.

LLM Engineering

  • Proven experience with prompt engineering patterns structured outputs and reliability techniques (self-checks constrained decoding schemas).
  • 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.
  • Awareness of fine-tuning approaches (when/why; trade-offs) and model selection strategies for regulated enterprise use.
  • Strong focus on latency/cost optimization and observability for GenAI systems (tracing cost controls quality monitoring).
  • Experience with Enterprise AI engine DataBricks AIBI DataIku AI and Others
  • Architecture Integration & Platform Thinking
  • Ability to define reference architectures for commercial AI solutions and scalable design patterns for multiple products/markets.
  • Experience integrating AI/agent services with enterprise applications/APIs authentication/authorization logging and audit trails.
  • Strong cloud-native engineering: containers orchestration CI/CD infrastructure automation and reliability practices.

Governance Risk & Responsible AI

  • 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.

Education Requirements

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.

Required Experience and Skills

  • 8 years in relevant experience across software engineering ML engineering MLOps/LLMOps or AI product engineering with hands on experience of production deployments at scale.
  • 4 years leading teams and driving delivery across multiple stakeholders; proven ability to mentor and raise engineering standards.
  • Strong hands-on proficiency in Python API/service development and modern engineering workflows (Git code reviews CI/CD).
  • Proven experience implementing LLM applications and/or AI agents in production including evaluation and monitoring.
  • Strong cloud-native foundation (Azure/AWS/GCP): containers orchestration automated testing release discipline and operational excellence.
  • Demonstrated capability to establish reusable frameworks/SDKs integration patterns and scalable operating models for AI delivery.
  • Excellent stakeholder communication: ability to explain trade-offs risks and outcomes clearly to technical and non-technical audiences

Required Skills:

Business Intelligence (BI) Coding Best Practices Computer Science Cost Controls Database Design Data Engineering Data Modeling Data Privacy Data Science Data Visualization Digital Healthcare End to End Management Enterprise Architecture (EA) Infrastructure Automation Machine Learning (ML) Operational Excellence Reference Architectures Responsible AI Software Development Stakeholder Communications Stakeholder Relationship Management Waterfall Model

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.

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements:

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Valid Driving License:

Hazardous Material(s):

Job Posting End Date:

07/20/2026

*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFOREthe listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.


Required Experience:

Director

Job DescriptionAssociate Director Commercial AI Tech Lead Digital Human HealthJob DescriptionThis role sits within the Commercial AI vertical of Digital Human Health (DHH) which is responsible for building and scaling AI capabilities across cross-functional teams and divisions. The team operates a...

About Company

Company Logo

Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, New Jersey, USA is known as “Merck” in the United States, Canada & Puerto Rico. We are known as “MSD” in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America & Asia Pacific. We are a global biopharmaceutical leader with a diverse portfolio of prescription medicine ... View more

View Profile View Profile