Merck KGaA Posted August 20, 2026

Principal Machine Learning Research 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.

Your role:

In this role, you will advance the methodological capabilities of the Advanced Data Science team within the Data Sciences organization. You will conduct applied machine learning research that extends beyond standard off-the-shelf approaches and creates new capabilities for high-value scientific and decision-making workflows across pharmaceutical Research & Development.

You will investigate emerging methods in areas such as large language model reasoning and planning, multimodal representation learning, causal machine learning, digital twins, uncertainty quantification, sequential decision-making, and learning from expert feedback. Your research will address limitations of current AI methods and develop innovative approaches for integrating heterogeneous evidence, modelling complex biological and clinical systems, and supporting decisions under uncertainty.

Working closely with Applied AI Engineers, machine learning experts, software engineers, scientists, and business stakeholders, you will translate promising research into reference implementations and demonstrable capabilities for priority R&D use cases. You will ensure that methodological innovation remains connected to real scientific problems and can progressively be transferred into robust AI-enabled applications.

You will develop and lead research collaborations with academic institutions and external scientific partners, identifying complementary expertise and shaping joint research programs. You will contribute to publications, conference presentations, and other scientific outputs that strengthen the external visibility of the team while supporting the development of differentiated AI capabilities within the organization.

You will work in close partnership with IT, platform, and engineering teams when research methods progress toward broader implementation. Your role will focus on methodological innovation, scientific validation, and translation into use cases, complementing IT ownership of enterprise platforms, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and production operations.

Staying at the forefront of machine learning and artificial intelligence research, you will critically evaluate new methods, reproduce relevant scientific advances, and identify opportunities where new research can create meaningful and measurable impact for pharmaceutical R&D.

Location: Israel

Who you are:

You hold a PhD in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, or a related quantitative discipline.

You have a minimum of 5 years of professional or research experience with a strong research track record in machine learning, demonstrated through high-quality peer-reviewed publications, including contributions to leading conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or comparable venues. Patents, open-source software, and other high-impact scientific outputs are also valued.

You possess deep expertise in one or more areas such as foundation models, large language model reasoning, multimodal learning, causal machine learning, digital twins, probabilistic modelling, uncertainty quantification, or sequential decision-making.

You have experience developing, implementing, and rigorously evaluating novel machine learning methods rather than relying exclusively on existing libraries or commercial AI services.

You are proficient in Python and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, or equivalent technologies.

You have experience designing reproducible computational experiments, establishing appropriate baselines, conducting ablation studies, and evaluating methods using scientifically rigorous benchmarks.

You are able to identify limitations in current state-of-the-art methods and formulate tractable research questions that are relevant to real-world scientific problems.

You have experience translating research prototypes into reference implementations that can be adopted or further developed by applied AI and software engineering teams.

You are comfortable working with complex, heterogeneous, and potentially multimodal data, such as clinical, molecular, imaging, real-world, digital health, or scientific data.

You have experience initiating or contributing to collaborations involving academic researchers, industry scientists, and multidisciplinary technical teams.

You possess strong scientific communication and writing skills and can communicate methodological concepts clearly to both specialist and non-specialist audiences.

You combine scientific ambition with a strong interest in translating methodological innovation into practical value.

Experience in pharmaceutical R&D, healthcare, life sciences, or another regulated scientific environment is considered an advantage.

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
Principal
Function
Biostatistics & Data Science
Therapeutic area
Not listed
Location
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Employment type
FULL_TIME

How this role compares

Computed from every other active Biostatistics & Data Science role in our database, not just this employer's listings.

We currently track 141 comparable Principal Biostatistics & Data Science roles across 30 biopharma companies.

141Comparable roles tracked
128Currently active
30Companies hiring similar roles
18Countries represented

Salary context

55 of 141 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 Statistical Programmer · Johnson & Johnson $106,000/yr – $170,200/yr
Peer group range $138,100 – $288,000 (median $186,375)

Where these roles are based

Top locations among the 141 comparable roles

United States82
India14
United Kingdom10
China5
Spain4
Canada4

+ 12 more countries

Seniority mix

141 of 141 peers have a known seniority level

Senior71
Principal42
Director28

Therapeutic area mix

14 of 141 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden

Immunology7
Oncology3
Rare Disease2
Neuroscience1
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.

45%similar
AbbVie Mettawa, IL Principal
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Novartis Hyderabad (Office), India Principal
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Johnson & Johnson Spring House, United States Principal
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc (US) Boston, United States Principal
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Chiesi Farmaceutici Parma, Italy Principal
Same function Same seniority
45%similar
Roche Mississauga, Ontario, Canada Principal
Same function Same seniority

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.

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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.

45%
Principal Data Scientist, 340B Strategy & Analytics
AbbVie · Mettawa, IL · Principal
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
45%
Principal Programmer, Statistical Programming (Remote)
Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc (US) · Boston, United States · Principal
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
45%
Senior Principal Statistical Programmer
Merck KGaA · Hyderabad, Andra Pradesh, India · Principal
Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
45%
Principal Scientist, R&D Data, Data Science & Artificial Intelligence - Immunology
Johnson & Johnson · Cambridge, United States · Principal
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.