Merck KGaA Posted August 15, 2026

Staff Software Engineer

St. Louis, Missouri, United States FULL_TIME
Information Technology

Merck KGaA is the source of truth for this posting and owns the application process. We surface normalized context and market comparison you won't find on the original listing.

About this opportunity

Work Your Magic with us!  Start your next chapter and join MilliporeSigma.

Ready to explore, break barriers, and discover more? We know you’ve got big plans – so do we! Our colleagues across the globe love innovating with science and technology to enrich people’s lives with our solutions in Healthcare, Life Science, and Electronics. Together, we dream big and are passionate about caring for our rich mix of people, customers, patients, and planet. That's why we are always looking for curious minds that see themselves imagining the unimaginable with us.

This role does not offer sponsorship for work authorization. External applicants must be eligible to work in the US.

Your Role:

We are looking for a Staff Applied AI Engineer to build scalable, production-grade backend applications that leverage large and complex datasets. This role is software engineering first, with a strong emphasis on designing reliable systems that ingest, process, and serve data to power modern applications and AI-driven solutions.

You will work closely with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers to build robust backend services, data-intensive applications, and production AI systems. Success in this role requires strong software engineering fundamentals, practical experience working with data throughout its lifecycle, and the ability to design systems that are scalable, maintainable, and reliable in production.

Essential Job Functions:

Lead technical strategy for AI/LLM systems across multiple products

Architect retrieval, orchestration, agentic, and evaluation systems that run reliably in production

Set the standards for AI safety, evaluation, observability, and responsible rollout in a regulated context

Mentor Junior-level engineers into strong AI engineers; Employ AI Native development skills to multiply the productivity (Claude, etc.)

Lead the frontier: evaluate new models, techniques, and tools, and bring the right ones into the team

Design, develop, and maintain scalable Python applications and backend services.

Build systems that ingest, validate, transform, and manage structured and unstructured data in production environments.

Design data models and storage solutions that support scalable, high-performance applications.

Develop reusable components for data processing, validation, enrichment, and feature generation.

Who You Are

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related quantitative field.

At least 3 years of hands-on experience in machine learning, data science, search relevance, or ranking systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep recent time leading production AI/LLM systems

Proven expertise in Python and ML frameworks (MLFlow, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-  learn, or equivalent).

Strong background in statistical analysis, data exploration, and working with  large-scale datasets.

Experience with feature engineering, data preprocessing, and data

Seasoned hands-on coder; still writes production Python regularly

Seasoned system designer for AI systems at scale, retrieval, agents, evaluation, latency, and cost, vector databases/pipelines

Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade backend applications.

Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs and distributed systems.

Strong SQL skills and experience working with relational databases; familiarity with NoSQL databases or modern data storage technologies is a plus.

Solid understanding of data engineering fundamentals, including data quality, validation, transformation, modeling, and efficient storage.

Experience designing systems that process large datasets reliably and efficiently.

Experience with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or AWS.

Experience using Docker, Git, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and modern software engineering best practices.

Core engineering stack

Languages: Python, REST API, Pandas, NumPy

Cloud and infrastructure: AWS Services and/or GCP, Kubernetes, Bedrock

Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka

Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc.

Vector Databases like Qdrant

Nice to have Skills:

Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration.

Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging platforms such as Kafka.

Familiarity with ML model deployment and inference pipelines

Location

This role can be based in either our St. Louis, MO or Burlington, MA office and requires a weekly onsite presence

Pay Range for this position: $110,500 - $165,900. The offer range represents the anticipated low and high end of the base pay compensation for this position. The actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level of experience, education, skills, and other job-related factors. Position may be eligible for sales or performance-based bonuses. Benefits offered by the Company include health insurance, paid time off (PTO), retirement contributions, and other perquisites. For more information click here:  https://careers.emdgroup.com/us/en/benefits

What we offer: We are curious minds that come from a broad range of backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences. We believe that this variety drives excellence and innovation, strengthening our ability to lead in science and technology. We are committed to creating access and opportunities for all to develop and grow at your own pace. Join us in building a culture of inclusion and belonging that impacts millions and empowers everyone to work their magic and champion human progress!

Apply now and become a part of a team that is dedicated to Sparking Discovery and Elevating Humanity!

Job details

Seniority
Not listed
Function
Information Technology
Therapeutic area
Not listed
Location
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Employment type
FULL_TIME

How this role compares

Computed from every other active Information Technology role in our database, not just this employer's listings.

We currently track 1211 comparable Information Technology roles across 60 biopharma companies.

1211Comparable roles tracked
1154Currently active
60Companies hiring similar roles
32Countries represented

Salary context

151 of 1211 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)

Peers share this role's job function. This posting doesn't list a seniority level, so peers aren't narrowed by seniority either -- the range below may span more levels than usual.

This roleSubject $110,500/yr – $165,900/yr
Lowest disclosed · Senior Data Security Engineer (Insider Risk Management – Engineering) · AbbVie $0/hr – $0/hr (≈ $0–$0/yr)
Highest disclosed · Senior Director, Targets and Mechanisms Solutions · Pfizer $230,900/yr – $384,800/yr
Peer group range $0 – $307,850 (median $165,900)

Where these roles are based

Top locations among the 1211 comparable roles

India563
United States254
Spain116
Poland74
Portugal34
China22

+ 26 more countries

Seniority mix

665 of 1211 peers have a known seniority level

Senior308
Manager153
Principal56
Associate52
Associate Director44
Director35
Senior Director12
Intern/Fellow/Postdoc4
Executive/VP1

Therapeutic area mix

2 of 1211 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden

Oncology1
Vaccines & Infectious Disease1

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The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.

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40%similar
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Notify me about similar jobs

Get an email when we spot other openings like this one – same job function, comparable seniority, roles you'd actually want to see.

How we calculate "similar"

No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.

Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.

40%
Technical Lead - Software Developer, Data Foundry
Lilly · San Francisco, California, United States of America · Seniority not listed
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
40%
Senior Manager, SAP – Planning and Manufacturing
Gilead Sciences, Inc. · Foster City, United States · Manager
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
40%
Director, IT Procurement Solutions
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Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
40%
Director, IT SAP Product Lifecycle and Quality
Gilead Sciences, Inc. · Foster City, United States · Director
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
Unmatched or unknown dimensions score exactly the same: 0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.