Hybrid Technical Lead – External and Scientific Engagement

at MSD

• Job title: Technical Lead – External and Scientific Engagement
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Amazon Redshift, AWS, Azure, Cloud, Docker, ETL, Grafana, GraphQL, JavaScript, Jenkins, Kafka, Kubernetes, Microservices, Node.js, Oracle, Prometheus, Python, PyTorch, React, Spark, SQL, Terraform, Vault
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Prague, Czechia

About the role

• Technical Lead guiding discovery-driven IT initiatives and AI projects at biopharmaceutical company. Mentoring teams and ensuring successful project delivery while leveraging cutting-edge science.

Responsibilities

• Lead and own technical execution of discovery IT initiatives and AI projects, from ideation through POC, pilot, and handover to development teams.
• Architect, design, and implement POCs to validate business value, technical feasibility, and scalability for discovery use cases.
• Guide and mentor cross-functional engineering teams (onshore and offshore), providing technical direction, code reviews, best practices, and hands-on support as needed.
• Collaborate closely with business stakeholders, product owners, and research teams to translate scientific and business requirements into technical solutions and project roadmaps.
• Serve as primary technical liaison between business, data science, infrastructure, and offshore development teams to ensure alignment and timely delivery.
• Drive adoption of modern development practices: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, secure coding standards, and observability.
• Lead technical evaluations and vendor/tool selection related to AI, data platforms, and application infrastructure.
• Provide hands-on development in Python, Node.js/React (or guide developers), and ensure high quality implementation of backend and frontend components.
• Ensure data integrity, lineage, and governance when integrating with systems such as Veeva Vault and enterprise data platforms.
• Oversee deployment and management of solutions on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), and collaborate with cloud/infrastructure teams for scalability, security, and cost optimization.
• Track and report project status, risks, and mitigation plans to leadership; escalate when necessary.
• Promote knowledge sharing, establish technical standards, and build repeatable patterns for discovery POCs and AI initiatives.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional IT experience, with progressively increasing technical and leadership responsibilities.
• Full-stack development
• Frontend technologies: Expertise in modern frontend frameworks such as React (including Hooks, state management libraries, and performance optimization) and experience with rapid prototyping/visualization frameworks like Streamlit for data-driven UIs.
• Backend: Strong experience with Node.js (Express, NestJS or similar), RESTful and GraphQL API design, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), middleware, and microservices patterns.
• Language proficiency: Advanced Python for backend services, scripting, ML integration, and automation.
• AI / Machine Learning: Practical experience building prototyping and productionizing ML/AI models (supervised, unsupervised, NLP, and generative-model POCs).
• Familiarity with ML frameworks and libraries (PyTorch, Hugging Face, GPPTeal, Claud, Gemini).
• Knowledge of model evaluation, validation, feature engineering, experiment tracking (MLflow), and model deployment patterns.
• Experience integrating AI models into applications and APIs, and working with data scientists on model lifecycle.
• Data engineering & analytics: Hands-on with Databricks/Spark for large-scale data processing.
• ETL/ELT: Experience with dbt (transformations, testing, modularity), building reliable data pipelines and mature data models.
• Databases: Strong SQL skills and experience with Oracle (query tuning, schema design, indexing), plus familiarity with modern analytical stores (Snowflake, Redshift) is a plus.
• Data governance: Knowledge of lineage, cataloging, metadata, quality checks, and compliance in regulated environments.
• Integration & domain systems: Understanding of Vault architecture, document and metadata models, Vault APIs, Vault SDKs and integration patterns for ingesting, synchronizing, and securing regulated content.
• API integrations: Robust experience in designing integrations between cloud services, SaaS systems, and on-prem systems; message queues and streaming (Kafka, SQS, Event Hubs) knowledge preferred.
• Cloud platforms: Strong practical experience with AWS and/or Azure (compute, storage, networking, IAM, managed data services).
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience with Terraform, ARM templates, or CloudFormation for reproducible environments.
• Containerization & orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (deployment patterns, Helm charts, observability).
• Security & compliance: Identity and access control, encryption in transit/at rest, secrets management, and secure deployment practices.
• CI/CD: Design and implement pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI) for build, test, security scanning, and deploy across environments.
• Automated testing: Unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests; test frameworks for Python/Node/React.
• Observability: Logging, monitoring, alerting (ELK/Elastic Stack, Prometheus, Grafana), and tracing (OpenTelemetry).
• GitHub/Git workflows: Branching strategies, pull request policies, code review best practices, dependency management.
• Collaboration tools: Jira/Azure DevOps for backlog and sprint management, Confluence or similar for documentation.
• System architecture: Design scalable, resilient microservices and data pipelines; trade-off analysis for latency, throughput, cost, and security.
• API-first design: Contract-first development, versioning, backward compatibility.
• Event-driven architecture: Designing loosely coupled services using events/streams.
• Scalability and performance: Load testing, caching strategies, database partitioning/sharding, query optimization.
• Experience coordinating and leading offshore development teams and third-party vendors, with demonstrated success in distributed team delivery.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills; ability to translate technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Strong problem solving, architectural design, and decision-making skills.
• Knowledge of data governance, security and compliance requirements relevant to discovery and regulated industries.

Benefits

• Exciting work in a great team, global projects, international environment
• Opportunity to learn and grow professionally within the company globally
• Hybrid working model, flexible role pattern
• Competitive salary & incentive pay
• Pension and health insurance contributions
• Internal reward system and referral scheme
• 5 weeks annual leave, 5 sick days, 15 days of certified sick leave paid above statutory requirements annually, 40 paid hours annually for volunteering activities, 12 weeks of parental contribution
• Cafeteria for tax free benefits according to your choice (meal vouchers, sport, culture, health, travel, etc.), Multisport Card Vodafone, Raiffeisen Bank, Foodora, and discount programmes
• Up-to-date laptop and iPhone
• Parking in the garage, showers, refreshments, massage chairs, library, music corner