Associate Data Scientist

Merck’s Digital Sciences team, within the Analytical Enabling Capabilities group of Analytical R&D, is seeking skilled Data Workflow Engineers to design and implement data pipelines that support the discovery and development of novel medicines and vaccines. This team collaborates across the research pipeline, working on projects ranging from predictive sciences to instrument metrology. The role is highly collaborative, partnering directly with scientists and IT teams to automate data workflows, streamline experimental processes, and enable more efficient research across all drug modalities, including small molecules, peptides, biologics, and vaccines.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable data workflows and pipelines in Python.
• Partner with scientists, SMEs, and business clients to gather and translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Collaborate with IT teams to implement and support workflows in AWS cloud environments.
• Develop ETL processes for data ingestion, wrangling, and transformation.
• Manage project timelines, deliverables, and effort estimates.
• Participate in daily standups and provide regular updates on progress, challenges, and solutions.
• Present results and technical solutions to collaborators and stakeholders.
• Continuously identify process improvements and suggest innovative approaches to common data workflow challenges.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or in a Chemistry discipline with strong programming expertise.

Experience

• 4–6 years of relevant professional experience.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS services (Lambda, S3, CloudFormation, RDS, ECR).
• Proficiency in Python 3.9+ with experience using packages such as Boto3, Pandas, pyodbc, and openpyxl.
• Experience with virtual environments (conda) and IDEs (VS Code or PyCharm).
• Strong background in ETL development, data wrangling, ingestion, and pipeline design.
• Skilled in software design, testing, version control (Git/GitHub), CI/CD (GitHub Actions), relational databases, and SQL.
• Familiarity with multiple data/file formats (XLSX, YAML, JSON, CSV, TSV).
• Strong communication skills and ability to work independently or within a team.

Preferred Skills

• Additional AWS services (SQS, DLQ, SNS, EventBridge, API Gateway).
• Python packages such as Cerberus, PyYAML, logging; experience with linters, type hints, and regex.
• Experience with data pipeline tools such as Dataiku or Trifacta.
• Prior experience in pharmaceutical research IT, working with scientific or genomics data.

Additional Information

• Location: West Point, PA – onsite 2–3 days per week required.
• Positions available: 2.
• This is not a typical IT role—ideal candidates will work closely with scientists to understand experimental data and automate workflows in support of research.