Specialist Search and Backend Engineer

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Specialist Search and Backend Engineer

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 companys’ 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

As a Senior Backend Search and Anaytics Engineer, you will architect and deliver the core backend systems, search engines, data pipelines, and APIs that power Discover. Your work will impact:

Platform Search Performance & Discoverability

• You will improve search relevance, indexing quality, ranking logic, and metadata-driven search experiences trusted by thousands of enterprise users.
• High‑Scale API Infrastructure Across the Enterprise
• Your API engineering decisions impact integration reliability, data access speed, platform stability, and customer experience.

Data Pipelines & Analytics Intelligence

• ETL workflows, search analytics, and data ingestion pipelines built by you fuel data freshness, insights, and product intelligence.

CI/CD Velocity & Engineering Productivity

• Your work in GitHub Actions and DevOps automation ensures fast, safe, zero-downtime deployments with automated test coverage and quality gates.

Enterprise Reliability & Scalability

• You directly influence uptime, performance, operational efficiency, and cost optimization across AWS and backend services.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Engineering / API Engineering

• Design, implement, and optimize Java 11+/17 Spring Boot microservices.
• Build API-first backend services following standards: versioning, idempotency, pagination, filtering, rate limits, throttling, retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers.
• Integrate Github Copilot and proficiency in AI coding tools and integration.
• Understanding of Context Engineering
• Own end-to-end API lifecycle: design → build → document → test → deploy → monitor.
• Build and maintain backend systems for search indexing, ranking, metadata enrichment, and analytics pipelines.
• Write clean, modular, secure code with strong logging, validation, exception handling, and resiliency patterns.

Search Analytics & Optimization

• Capture and analyze search queries, clickstreams, user behavior, autocomplete patterns, and ranking metrics.
• Optimize search relevance, result ordering, and metadata-driven discoverability.
• Identify zero‑result searches and implement corrective indexing or transformation logic.
• Integrate platform telemetry using Google Analytics (GA4) and search instrumentation.

ETL, Data Pipelines & Analytics Workflows (Python, Airflow, AWS Glue)

• Build robust ETL workflows using:
  •  Apache Airflow
  •  AWS Glue
  • Python
• Automate search analytics pipelines, metadata ingestion, data quality scoring, and data lake operations.

• Maintain data pipelines on AWS S3, ensuring schema integrity, partitioning, and performance optimization.

AWS Cloud Engineering

• Develop and deploy backend services using:
  • Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway
  • SQS/SNS, EventBridge
  • DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora
  • S3, Glue, CloudWatch, X‑Ray
• Implement cost optimization strategies across compute, ETL, and API workloads.

• Implement security & governance standards (IAM fine-grained roles, KMS encryption, secrets management).

Quality Engineering

• Build and maintain robust test suites:
  • Unit testing – JUnit, Mockito
  • Integration testing – Testcontainers
  • Contract testing – OpenAPI validators
  • Load/Performance testing – JMeter/Locust

Work with QA to establish backend test automation frameworks and quality gates.

GitHub Actions, CI/CD & DevOps Automation

A major part of this role includes CI/CD engineering.

• Build enterprise-grade GitHub Actions pipelines:
  Multi-stage pipelines (build → test → scan → package → deploy)
  Unit, integration, and contract test automation
  Security scans (SAST/DAST, dependency scanning)
  Code quality gates (SonarQube or equivalent)
• Implement GitHub Actions capabilities like:
  • Reusable workflows
  • Environment-specific deployment workflows
  • OIDC for secure AWS deploys
  • Branch protection rules
  • PR checks, automation, and merge gate rules
• Ensure consistent artifact versioning, tagging, and release processes.
• Improve developer experience through automation, tooling, repeatable workflows, and pipeline optimization.

Observability, Reliability & Operations

• Implement distributed tracing, structured logging, and custom metrics.
• Own SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, alerting, and dashboards.
• Participate in on-call rotation, incident management, RCA, and reliability engineering.
• Reduce P1/P2 incidents through preventative design and automated guardrails.

Collaboration

• Lead API design reviews, code reviews, and architectural walkthroughs.
• Partner with Product, UX, Data Engineering, Cloud, and Platform Engineering.
• Contribute to engineering standards, API governance, and best practices.

Primary skills
Cloud engineering (AWS / Azure), CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / IaC), Kubernetes / container orchestration, DevSecOps / security automation, Monitoring / observability, AI-driven automation, Reusable template-driven engineering, Analytics / telemetry pipelines, API / microservices engineering, Google Analytics / product analytics

Nice-to-have skills
Context engineering, ETL / ELT pipelines, Jenkins / Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions, Helm / service mesh, Secrets management, Performance optimization, Scripting (Python / Bash), Documentation / agile collaboration
 

Qualifications (Required)

• 5+ years’ experience in backend engineering.
• Strong expertise in Java 11+/17, Spring Boot, microservices, and REST API engineering.
• Hands-on experience with Python for ETL or backend data tasks.
• Strong understanding of ETL frameworks (Airflow or AWS Glue)
• Deep experience with AWS (API Gateway, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, RDS/Aurora).
• Strong GitHub Actions and CI/CD expertise: pipelines, reusable workflows, testing automation, OIDC, ECR deployments.
• Experience with Docker, container orchestration (ECS/EKS preferred).
• Excellent debugging, performance optimization, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong knowledge of cloud security (IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager).
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Tools & Tech Stack

Java 17 and above | Spring Boot | Python | Apache Airflow | AWS Glue | AWS S3 | AWS Lambda | AWS Redshift| AWS Athena | ECS/EKS | DynamoDB | RDS/Aurora | API Gateway | SQS/SNS | EventBridge | Docker | GitHub Actions | OpenAPI | JUnit | Testcontainers | SonarQube | Snyk | CloudWatch |CI/CD -Github actions, Jenkins| X-Ray | Google Analytics | Search Telemetry

KPIs & Success Metrics

• High API reliability (SLO compliance, low error rates)
• Improved search relevance & reduced zero-result searches
• ETL pipeline success rate ≥ 99%
• Increase in safe deployment frequency with zero rollback
• Reduction in P1/P2 incidents
• Improved code quality & test coverage
• Cost-efficient AWS workloads

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 inventing for life, 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

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. 

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