
Associate Director, DevOps
Merck
Summary
As the APEX DevOps Associate Director, you will lead DevOps strategy, continuous delivery, and platform automation within our APEX (AI, Process, and EXperience) organization. In this high-impact leadership role, you will champion a modern, AI-augmented engineering culture—driving enterprise CI/CD pipelines, release orchestration, and developer enablement across a dynamic technology landscape in support of our mission to deliver innovative health solutions.
Job description
Key Responsibilities
- Define, govern, and execute the enterprise DevOps roadmap tailored for APEX initiatives, accelerating delivery velocity, quality, and platform resilience across global product squads.
- Foster an AI-native operational culture across the engineering organization, leveraging AI coding assistants, automated test generation, and agentic workflows to streamline deployment pipelines and enhance developer productivity.
- Prepare and present executive summaries, capability roadmaps, and delivery metrics (such as DORA metrics and deployment lead times) to senior leadership.
- Partner closely with software engineering and Product teams to align DevOps frameworks with day-to-day agile execution, serving as the primary senior escalation point for release and delivery operations.
- Define and enforce automated release governance, continuous delivery patterns, and blue/green or canary deployment strategies to ensure secure, compliant, zero-downtime releases across enterprise applications.
- Champion Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and pipeline automation (GitHub Actions), eliminating manual toil, establishing self-service developer environments, and enforcing standardization.
- Direct, coach, and inspire a global team of DevOps and platform engineers, fostering continuous experimentation, engineering excellence, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Manage the squad’s operational budget, software licenses, and cloud capacity planning, building clear business cases for strategic tooling and platform investments.
- Direct partnerships with key technology and DevOps tool providers, standardizing toolsets, tracking SLAs, and maximizing ROI across the APEX development ecosystem.
- Embed automated security scans, compliance-as-code guardrails, and full-stack observability into pipelines to meet stringent healthcare regulatory standards.
- Maintain deep technical fluency, readily engaging with engineering squads to troubleshoot pipeline failures, refine deployment architectures, and unblock critical path deliverables.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Minimum of 7+ years of progressive technical leadership experience in DevOps, Cloud Platform Delivery, and Release Management, including demonstrated success directly managing, mentoring, and scaling high-performing technical squads.
- Practical familiarity with adopting modern AI developer tooling, AI coding assistants, and agentic workflows to accelerate delivery, optimize workflows, and drive operational efficiency.
- Advanced technical proficiency with AWS core services (IAM, VPC, EKS/ECS, Lambda, Load Balancing, KMS) and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
- Proven track record designing and maintaining enterprise-scale CI/CD pipelines utilizing GitHub, GitHub Actions, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern artifact repositories.
- Demonstrated capability to oversee squad operational budgets, forecast cloud/tooling expenditures, and present strategic business cases to senior executive stakeholders.
- Outstanding verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to translate complex DevOps architectures and delivery strategies into executive-ready narratives.
Preferred Qualifications
- Relevant certifications in AWS (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer), DevOps methodologies, or enterprise platforms (Salesforce / Veeva).
- Hands-on experience implementing DevSecOps, automated policy-as-code, and compliance guardrails within a regulated healthcare, life sciences, or GxP environment.
- Solid grounding in Site Reliability Engineering principles, error budgeting, and telemetry platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Dynatrace).
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline
- Minimum of 7+ years of progressive technical leadership experience in DevOps, Cloud Platform Delivery, and Release Management
- Demonstrated success directly managing, mentoring, and scaling high-performing technical squads
- Practical familiarity with modern AI developer tooling, AI coding assistants, and agentic workflows
- Advanced technical proficiency with AWS core services (IAM, VPC, EKS/ECS, Lambda, Load Balancing, KMS)
- Infrastructure as Code using Terraform
- Proven track record designing and maintaining enterprise-scale CI/CD pipelines utilizing GitHub, GitHub Actions, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern artifact repositories
- Demonstrated capability to oversee squad operational budgets, forecast cloud/tooling expenditures, and present strategic business cases to senior executive stakeholders
- Outstanding verbal and written communication skills with executive presence
- Preferred: Relevant certifications in AWS, DevOps methodologies, or enterprise platforms (Salesforce / Veeva)
- Preferred: Hands-on experience implementing DevSecOps, automated policy-as-code, and compliance guardrails within a regulated healthcare, life sciences, or GxP environment
- Preferred: Solid grounding in Site Reliability Engineering principles, error budgeting, and telemetry platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Dynatrace)
Benefits
- Medical, Dental & Vision
- Retirement Benefits
- 401(k)
- Paid Holidays
- Vacation
- Compassionate Leave
- Sick Days
- Annual Bonus
- Long-Term Incentive
Company overview
Merck & Co., Inc., known as Merck in the United States and Canada and MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme) internationally, is a premier American multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Rahway, New Jersey. Founded in 1891 as the U.S. subsidiary of the German Merck Group, the company became independent following World War I and has since grown into one of the world's largest biomedical companies, ranking fourth globally by revenue. Merck operates across three core business segments: pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and animal health products. The company is renowned for its groundbreaking research and development, having brought numerous life-saving medicines to market including Keytruda (pembrolizumab), a leading immunotherapy for cancer treatment that generated $29.5 billion in 2024 revenue, and Gardasil, a revolutionary HPV vaccine. With approximately 75,000 employees worldwide, Merck maintains a robust pipeline of innovative therapies focused on oncology, vaccines, hospital acute care, cardiology, neuroscience, virology, immunology, and diabetes. The company invests heavily in R&D, spending $17.9 billion in 2024 alone, demonstrating its commitment to advancing scientific discovery. Merck's legacy spans over 130 years of bringing hope to humanity through important medicines and vaccines, operating with a purpose to use leading-edge science to save and improve lives globally while fostering an inclusive workforce and responsible business practices.