Senior Technical Architect , Data Context Layer

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 company’s 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

This role is part of a broader enterprise initiative to establish a Data Context Layer (DCL) — a foundational capability designed to provide consistent, reusable, and scalable context across enterprise data products.

The DCL is intended to address challenges related to data fragmentation, lack of shared semantics, and inconsistent interpretation of data across systems and products. It establishes a unified layer for representing context, relationships, and meaning, enabling downstream products to operate with greater consistency, interoperability, and intelligence.

In addition, the DCL plays a critical role in enabling agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise by providing the structured context and semantic grounding required for intelligent agents to operate reliably. This includes ensuring that agent-driven workflows and decisions are based on consistent, governed, and interpretable data context, reducing risks associated with fragmentation, ambiguity, and lack of control.

Within this initiative, we are seeking a Senior Technical Architect to design and implement the technical foundation for an enterprise platform that enables teams to publish, discover, and consume standardized data context through self-service. This role is responsible for translating architecture principles into concrete technical patterns, integration designs, and implementation guidance that ensure the platform is scalable, secure, and production-ready.

The ideal candidate has strong hands-on experience in platform architecture, data systems, semantic technologies, and AI-enabled workflows. Familiarity with ontologies, OWL, metadata-driven systems, agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering is required, as the platform must support both human and AI consumers of context.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement technical architecture patterns for the enterprise data context self-service platform.
• Define solution-level technical approaches for:
  • context publishing
  • discovery
  • access control
  • versioning
  • validation
  • lineage and provenance
  • monitoring and observability
• Collaborate with product, lead architecture, engineering, service design, security, and governance teams to turn platform requirements into implementable designs.
• Develop technical standards and reference implementations that can be reused by delivery teams.
• Evaluate and integrate enabling technologies such as:
  • ontology and semantic modeling approaches
  • OWL/RDF stacks
  • knowledge graphs
  • semantic layers
  • MCP, A2A, and timbr-like technologies where relevant
• Ensure the platform supports both self-service human workflows and AI/agentic consumption patterns.
• Define technical requirements for deployment, scaling, security, resilience, and maintainability.
• Support development teams through design reviews, implementation guidance, troubleshooting, and architecture decisions.
• Ensure context services can move from development to production with robust release, testing, and operational controls.
• Contribute to the design of APIs, data contracts, and integration patterns that make context reusable across the enterprise.
• Help shape how the platform supports agentic AI workflows, including structured prompt context, tool access, and reliable grounding data.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in technical architecture, solution architecture, data architecture, or senior engineering roles.
• Strong hands-on experience with data platforms, APIs, distributed systems, or platform engineering.
• Familiarity with ontologies, OWL, RDF, knowledge graphs, and semantic layer concepts.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable, secure, production-grade platform capabilities.
• Working knowledge of agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering concepts.
• Ability to translate architecture requirements into practical technical designs and implementation patterns.
• Strong problem-solving skills and experience working closely with engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with MCP, A2A, timbr, or similar context-serving or semantic interoperability technologies.
• Background in enterprise metadata management, data governance, or knowledge platform design.
• Experience supporting AI-enabled platforms or agentic workflows.
• Knowledge of CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, observability, IAM, testing, and lifecycle management.
• Experience building reusable reference implementations or technical accelerators.
• Familiarity with regulated or security-sensitive enterprise environments.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means:

• technical designs are clear, reusable, and implementable
• the platform is reliable, scalable, and production-ready
• teams can build on common patterns rather than custom one-off solutions
• context is delivered consistently to both applications and AI/agentic consumers
• development-to-production transitions are smooth and governed
• architecture decisions improve maintainability, interoperability, and adoption

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 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.

#HYDIT2025

Required Skills:

Cloud Infrastructure, Context Mapping, Data Governance, Distributed Systems, Emerging Technologies, Enterprise Security Operations, Metadata Management, Methods and Tools, Ontology, Operational Control, Platform Engineering, Prompt Engineering, Requirements Management, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, Strategic Planning, System Designs, Technical Advice, Technical Designs, Technical Requirements

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:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

No Travel Required

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Not Applicable

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

Job Posting End Date:

07/3/2026

*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.