Associate Director, DevOps

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.

• →APEX DevOps Strategy & Vision: Define, govern, and execute the enterprise DevOps roadmap tailored for APEX (AI, Process, and EXperience) initiatives, accelerating delivery velocity, quality, and platform resilience across global product squads.
• →AI-Augmented Engineering & Modern Practices: 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.
• →Executive Alignment & Value Realization: Prepare and present executive summaries, capability roadmaps, and delivery metrics (such as DORA metrics and deployment lead times) to senior leadership, demonstrating operational resilience, efficiency, and continuous business value.
• →Stakeholder & Engineering Collaboration: 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.
• →Release Orchestration & Governance: 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.
• →Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Champion Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and pipeline automation (GitHub Actions), eliminating manual toil, establishing self-service developer environments, and enforcing standardization.
• →Team Leadership & Culture: Direct, coach, and inspire a global team of DevOps and platform engineers, fostering continuous experimentation, engineering excellence, and cross-functional collaboration.
• →Financial & Resource Stewardship: Manage the squad’s operational budget, software licenses, and cloud capacity planning, building clear business cases for strategic tooling and platform investments.
• →Vendor & Tooling Ecosystem Governance: Direct partnerships with key technology and DevOps tool providers, standardizing toolsets, tracking SLAs, and maximizing ROI across the APEX development ecosystem.
• →DevSecOps, Compliance & Observability: Embed automated security scans, compliance-as-code guardrails, and full-stack observability (tracing, latency, application performance, and system health) into pipelines to meet stringent healthcare regulatory standards.
• →Pragmatic Hands-On Leadership: Maintain deep technical fluency, readily engaging with engineering squads to troubleshoot pipeline failures, refine deployment architectures, and unblock critical path deliverables.

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience: 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.
• AI-Native Mindset: Practical familiarity with adopting modern AI developer tooling, AI coding assistants, and agentic workflows to accelerate delivery, optimize workflows, and drive operational efficiency.
• Cloud & Automation Engineering: Advanced technical proficiency with AWS core services (IAM, VPC, EKS/ECS, Lambda, Load Balancing, KMS) and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• CI/CD & Modern DevOps Tooling: Proven track record designing and maintaining enterprise-scale CI/CD pipelines utilizing GitHub, GitHub Actions, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern artifact repositories.
• Budgetary & Strategic Management: Demonstrated capability to oversee squad operational budgets, forecast cloud/tooling expenditures, and present strategic business cases to senior executive stakeholders.
• Communication & Executive Presence: Outstanding verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to translate complex DevOps architectures and delivery strategies into executive-ready narratives.

• Industry Certifications: Relevant certifications in AWS (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer), DevOps methodologies, or enterprise platforms (Salesforce / Veeva).
• Regulated Environment Experience: Hands-on experience implementing DevSecOps, automated policy-as-code, and compliance guardrails within a regulated healthcare, life sciences, or GxP environment.
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Solid grounding in Site Reliability Engineering principles, error budgeting, and telemetry platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Dynatrace).

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Where required by law, the compensation range for this role is provided below.

The salary range for the primary location of this role is:

This range reflects the Company's reasonable expectation of the base salary applicable to this role at the time of posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, government requirements, and business or organizational needs. The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits. Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. More information about benefits is available at https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.