Job Description

Role Overview

This role is part of a broader enterprise initiative to establish a Data Context Layer (DCL) — a foundational capability designed to provide consistent, reusable, and scalable context across enterprise data products.

The DCL is intended to address challenges related to data fragmentation, lack of shared semantics, and inconsistent interpretation of data across systems and products. It establishes a unified layer for representing context, relationships, and meaning, enabling downstream products to operate with greater consistency, interoperability, and intelligence.

In addition, the DCL plays a critical role in enabling agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise by providing the structured context and semantic grounding required for intelligent agents to operate reliably. This includes ensuring that agent-driven workflows and decisions are based on consistent, governed, and interpretable data context, reducing risks associated with fragmentation, ambiguity, and lack of control.

Within this initiative, we are seeking a Lead Architect to define and guide the conceptual and technical architecture for an enterprise platform that enables teams topublish, discover, and consume standardized data context through self-service. This role will shape the target architecture, integration patterns, and technical standards that support scalable, secure, and production-ready context services across the enterprise.

The ideal candidate has deep experience in enterprise architecture, data platforms, semantic technologies, and AI-enabled systems. Familiarity withontologies, OWL, metadata-driven architectures, agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineeringis required, as the platform must support both human and AI-driven consumers of context.

• Define the target architecture for the enterprise data context self-service platform.

• Establish architectural standards and patterns for:

  • context publishing

  • discovery

  • access control

  • versioning

  • validation

  • lineage and provenance

  • observability and monitoring

• Partner with product, engineering, service design, security, and governance teams to ensure the platform is technically sound and aligned to enterprise needs.

• Evaluate and recommend technologies and integration patterns including:

  • ontology and semantic modeling approaches

  • OWL/RDF-based systems

  • knowledge graphs

  • semantic layers

  • MCP, A2A, and Timbr-like technologies where applicable

• Design architecture that supports both self-service user workflows and AI/agentic consumption patterns.

• Ensure context can move from development to production in a governed, scalable, and supportable way.

• Define non-functional requirements including performance, resilience, security, compliance, and operational maintainability.

• Review solution designs and implementation plans to ensure adherence to architectural standards.

• Create reference architectures, patterns, and decision records to guide implementation teams.

• Collaborate with platform teams to support long-term scalability, reuse, and interoperability across domains.

• Help shape how the platform supportsagentic AI workflows, including structured prompt context, tool access, and reliable data grounding.

• Bachelors degree

• 8+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, data architecture, or platform architecture.

• Strong technical background in data platforms, metadata systems, semantic technologies, or AI infrastructure.

• Familiarity withontologies, OWL, RDF, knowledge graphs, and semantic layer concepts.

• Experience designing platforms that support self-service, enterprise-scale reuse, and governed access.

• Expertise in agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineeringconcepts.

• Experience defining and enforcing technical standards across multiple teams.

• Strong ability to communicate architecture decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience with MCP, A2A, Timbr, or similar context-serving or semantic interoperability technologies.

• Background in enterprise data governance, metadata management, or data catalog architectures.

• Experience supporting AI-enabled platforms or agentic workflows.

• Knowledge of production concerns such as observability, testing, CI/CD, identity and access management, and lifecycle management.

• Experience creating reference architectures and reusable patterns for platform teams.

• Familiarity with regulated or security-sensitive enterprise environments.

Success in this role means:

• the platform has a clear, scalable Conceptual/Technical architecture

• context is served consistently and securely across the enterprise

• teams can build and integrate using reusable patterns

• development-to-production flows are reliable and governed

• the platform supports both enterprise applications and AI/agentic use cases

• architectural decisions reduce duplication and increase long-term maintainability

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

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The salary range for this role is

This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employees 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.

You can apply for this role through https://jobs.merck.com/us/en (or via the Workday Jobs Hub if you are a current employee). The application deadline for this position is stated on this posting.

San Francisco Residents Only:We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only:We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los AngelesFair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

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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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