Merck KGaA Posted October 22, 2026

Associate Director RWD Scientist

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Full time
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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!

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.

United As One for Patients, our purpose in Healthcare is to help create, improve and prolong lives. We develop medicines, intelligent devices and innovative technologies in therapeutic areas such as Oncology, Neurology and Fertility. Our teams work together across 6 continents with passion and relentless curiosity in order to help patients at every stage of life. Joining our Healthcare team is becoming part of a diverse, inclusive and flexible working culture, presenting great opportunities for personal development and career advancement across the globe.

Associate Director, Real-World Data & Evidence Foundations

Data, Methods & Solutions · Patient-Focused Real-World Evidence (PRWE)

Role Overview

The Associate Director, Real-World Data & Evidence Foundations makes licensed real-world data fit for the studies and insights that depend on it. Claims, electronic health records are collected for care and billing, not for research. Each source brings its own challenges for new applications: gaps in enrollment, delayed resolution of claims, shifts between diagnosis coding versions. This person owns the path from a new data delivery to curated, documented, analysis-ready data a scientist can trust, and knows which of those problems matters for which question. They work on data platforms that IT and the enterprise platform teams own and run and bring the real-world data expertise those platforms need. Agentic AI coding tools are part of how they work every day.

Key Responsibilities

Real-World Data Curation

Assess each licensed claims, EHR and registry source for fitness for purpose before it is used: what it captures, and which questions it can and cannot answer.

Build and run the ingestion and curation pipelines that turn each delivery into analysis-ready data, handling enrollment and eligibility periods, claims lag and adjudication, and changes between coding-system versions.

Keep intact the details that change results, such as the decimal in an ICD-10 code, and document every transformation so a reviewer can trace any result back to the source files.

Map sources to common data models such as OMOP where reuse justifies it, and maintain the code lists, phenotype definitions and linkage rules that studies share.

Build standard cohorts and variables , with lookback and washout windows defined, so recurring questions do not start from raw data.

Check data quality and automated conformance, completeness and plausibility checks to inform each source’s fitness-for-purpose assessment.

Work with the platform teams on how each source is loaded, stored and refreshed, so a new data cut does not mean weeks of rework and routine cohort queries come back quickly.

Apply the terms of each data license and data use agreement, including access controls, small-cell suppression and output checks.

Agentic AI

Use agentic coding tools such as Claude Code routinely to write and test curation code, and maintain responsibility to review for quality and accuracy.

Work within company AI governance, and keep patient-level and licensed data out of any tool not approved for it.

Scientific & Strategic Leadership

Lead the design of standardized workflows which support complex non-interventional real-world studies and analytical strategies.

Strong understanding on how to frame research questions and define fit-for-purpose real-world evidence approaches.

Contribute standardized workflows for evidence strategies that support development, regulatory and broader product lifecycle decisions.

Anticipate methodological and data risks and propose practical solutions.

Decision Enablement

Translate repeatable analyses into clear, actionable insights for decision-making using standardized approaches.

Support portfolio-level decisions on evidence generation, data selection and analytical strategy.

Help ensure standardized evidence approaches are relevant to the questions being asked and the decisions they’re meant to support.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Collaborate across clinical development, biostatistics, regulatory, medical, HEOR, data science and IT.

Work with IT and the enterprise data and platform teams, who own the shared infrastructure, so curation work fits company architecture and security standards.

Build trusted working relationships that make execution and alignment easier.

Minimum Qualifications

PhD, or a Master’s degree with equivalent experience, in epidemiology, biostatistics, statistics, data science, computer science or a related quantitative field.

8+ years in real-world data or real-world evidence, including hands-on work preparing claims, EHR or registry data for research use.

Working command of the coding systems these sources use, such as ICD, CPT, NDC, ATC and LOINC, and of mapping between them.

Knowledge of how the way real-world data is collected shapes confounding, missingness and misclassification, and what that means for curation choices.

Solid grounding in observational study design and causal inference.

Strong Python and SQL, written with software engineering habits such as Git and automated testing. Enough R to work alongside analysts who use it.

Regular hands-on use of agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code on real projects, with the testing and review habits that keep the output trustworthy.

Clear communication of data choices and their consequences to scientists and decision makers.

Preferred Qualifications

OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools.

Experience with Israeli health data sources.

Linking or tokenizing patient records across real-world data sources.

Working on cloud data platforms with query performance in mind.

Computerized system validation (GxP) or other regulated data practice.

A publication record or open-source contributions in real-world data methods or tooling.

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
Associate Director
Function
Drug Discovery & Preclinical Research
Therapeutic area
Not listed
Location
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Employment type
Full time

How this role compares

Computed from every other active Drug Discovery & Preclinical Research role in our database, not just this employer's listings.

We currently track 292 comparable Associate Director Drug Discovery & Preclinical Research roles across 47 biopharma companies.

292Comparable roles tracked
265Currently active
47Companies hiring similar roles
18Countries represented

Salary context

142 of 292 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)

Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.

This roleSubject Not listed on this posting
Lowest disclosed · Senior Animal Behaviorist - Primate · Labcorp $70,000/yr – $80,000/yr
Peer group range $75,000 – $231,700 (median $145,470)

Where these roles are based

Top locations among the 292 comparable roles

United States224
India11
United Kingdom8
Switzerland6
Spain5
Japan5

+ 12 more countries

Seniority mix

292 of 292 peers have a known seniority level

Senior227
Associate Director41
Manager24

Therapeutic area mix

28 of 292 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden

Neuroscience10
Oncology9
Immunology8
Cardiovascular / CVRM1

Similar opportunities

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.

50%similar
Merck KGaA Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Senior
Same function Adjacent seniority Same country
45%similar
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc (USA) Tarrytown, United States Associate Director
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc (USA) Hawthorne, United States Associate Director
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45%similar
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc (USA) Tarrytown, United States Associate Director
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Amgen Inc. Thousand Oaks, United States Associate Director
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
RayzeBio, Inc San Diego, United States Associate Director
Same function Same seniority

Notify me about similar jobs

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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.

50%
Senior RWD Scientist
Merck KGaA · Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel · Senior
Function Therapeutic area Adjacent seniority Country
45%
Associate Director, R&D Chemistry, Peptidomimetics
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc (USA) · Hawthorne, United States · Associate Director
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
45%
Associate Director, In-Vivo Pharmacology
RayzeBio, Inc · San Diego, United States · Associate Director
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
45%
Sr Principal Scientist / Associate Director, Biomarker Assay Development Laboratory
Novartis · Cambridge (USA), United States · Associate 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.