Sr. Specialist, Cloud Engineering

 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 

We are seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to be a key contributor to our Managed Application Platform Services (MAPS) product team. This is an exciting opportunity to engineer and advance our enterprise-wide, Kubernetes-based container platform. In this role, you will help build the "paved road" that enables our application development teams to deliver value faster and more reliably. 

The MAPS team provides a secure, compliant, and highly automated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), reducing cognitive load and abstracting away the complexity of underlying infrastructure. We operate as strategic business partners, collaborating with teams worldwide to govern, grow, and operate container solutions. If you are passionate about building scalable platforms, implementing SRE and DevOps principles, solving complex problems, and enabling developer success through automation, we want you on our team. 

Primary Responsibility: 

• Architect, design, and engineer our global Kubernetes Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), focusing on scalability, reliability, security, and developer experience for the MAPS product suite. 

• Apply Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps principles to ensure high availability, performance, and resilience of the platform (e.g., defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, and streamlining incident response). 

• Implement robust Observability practices, building comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing capabilities to proactively identify and resolve issues across the infrastructure and application layers. 

• Develop and own the lifecycle of core platform services, including cluster management, container image services, and the broader ecosystem of cloud-native solutions. 

• Champion and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps best practices to manage our platform infrastructure and services. 

• Create a self-service platform experience by identifying and closing capability gaps, designing solutions, and automating the maintenance and lifecycle of platform components. 

• Define and enforce best practices and golden paths for container workloads, creating clear documentation and reference implementations for our internal developer community. 

• Serve as a subject matter expert and escalation point for the platform, troubleshooting complex issues across infrastructure, networking, and security domains. 

 Qualifications: 

Education Requirement: 

• BS Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience. 
   

Required Experience and Skills: 

• Deep hands-on expertise in architecting and managing large-scale Kubernetes clusters (e.g., EKS, AKS, or self-managed). 

• Strong Linux background with advanced systems administration, tuning, and deep troubleshooting capabilities. 

• Advanced Networking knowledge, particularly within containerized and cloud environments (VPC, subnets, routing, security groups, DNS, CNI, ingress/egress patterns). 

• Strong experience with core cloud-native technologies such as Helm, Cilium/Calico, Karpenter, and service meshes (e.g., Istio, Linkerd). 

• Deep understanding of Observability platforms and tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace, Datadog). 

• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Shell) with a strong focus on automation. 

• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code tools, particularly Terraform. 

Preferred Experience and Skills: 

• 8+ years of experience in IT, with a significant focus on platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps. 

• Hands-on experience with Cloud Foundry (Tanzu Application Service/TAS) is highly desirable. 

• Professional certifications in Kubernetes (e.g., CKA, CKAD) or cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure). 

• Deep experience with AWS services such as EKS, EC2, VPC, Route53, ALB, S3, RDS, and IAM. 

• Hands-on experience with Go programming for building operators or platform tooling. 

• Experience with CI/CD and GitOps tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD. 

• Demonstrated ability to thrive in a global, matrixed, and highly concurrent environment. 

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.