Associate Director, Quality Engineering Lead

Job description

Job Description Associate Director, Quality Engineering Lead The Opportunity Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare. Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products. Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats. Our Technology centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of the company IT operating model, Tech centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy. A focused group of leaders in each tech center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers. Role Overview: At our company, we aspire to be the premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company. We're at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions that advance the prevention and treatment of diseases in people and animals. We leverage leading-edge science to save and improve lives globally. Reporting to the Executive Director Digital Clinical Value Team lead, Clinical and Development Digital Solutions (CDDS), Research and Development (R&D) IT, the Associate Director of Information Technology will lead our initiatives in establishing the Quality Engineering practices across a business unit, drive quality engineering activities within Digital Clinical value team, enhance our internal software development testing practices across R&D IT with automation and quality by design mindset for our technology implementations. What will you do in this role: Community of Practice:Establish and lead the R&D IT Quality Engineering CoP, acting as the primary evangelist for quality engineering best practices across R&D IT execution teams across global time zones. Standardization: Drive the adoption of unified testing frameworks, CI/CD integrations, and quality metrics across disparate product teams. Drive the strategy, development, and governance of automated testing frameworks across GxP-regulated systems, including Discovery, Pre-Clinical, Clinical (Clinical CTMS/eTMF, EDC, Clinical Systems), Regulatory (RIM, Registration, Submission Publishing and Content Authoring) and Safety platforms. This role is a critical enabler of digital transformation, ensuring that validated systems meet regulatory requirements (FDA 21 CFR Part 11), while accelerating testing cycles, reducing manual effort, and improving overall system reliability Knowledge Sharing: Organize tech talks, workshops, and documentation initiatives to elevate the overall quality IQ of the broader software engineering organization. Quality Strategy & Execution: Architecture:Design and oversee scalable automated testing strategies (UI, API, Data/ETL, and Performance) leveraging existing enterprise testing tools. Shift-Left Focus: Embed quality early in the SDLC by championing TDD (test Driven Development) /BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) practices and risk-based quality testing. Design, oversee, and maintain robust, scalable automated test frameworks for GxP-regulated applications (e.g., Selenium, Tosca, Robot Framework, UFT, Playwright, or equivalent) Metrics & Reporting: Define and track key quality KPIs (e.g., defect escape rate, automation coverage) and report up to product line and value team leadership. Align Quality Engineering practices with GxP/regulatory requirements where applicable (e.g., audit readiness, traceability, validation support), not just standard testing practices. Define quality approaches for AI/ML and LLM-based solutions (e.g., model validation, output consistency, bias/risk monitoring) Define quality approaches for AI/ML and LLM-based solutions (e.g., model validation, output consistency, bias/risk monitoring) Cross-functional collaboration:Stakeholder Alignment: Partner within R&D IT, ITRMS, Quality, Validation and Enterprise teams to ensure quality strategies align with overarching business and architectural goals. Agile Delivery: Ensure QE is a seamless part of Agile delivery pipelines, minimizing bottlenecks while maximizing release confidence. Vendor quality standards: ensure quality standards across third-party/vendor-delivered components. Team Leadership: Recruit and retain talent to build matrixed teams and the ecosystem to empower them. Networking and Recruitment: Develop an external presence and strong internal networks to recruit highly skilled and diverse talent, stay current with industry trends, bringing best practices in and establish effective internal partnerships. What Should you have: Required Skills: Experience and Education:Bachelor’s degree in IT, computer science, life sciences, or a related discipline; advanced degree preferred. 10+ years in Software Quality Engineering or related fields with at least 3-5 years in a leadership/management role. Proven track record of building and scaling engineering or QE teams in India from ground up. Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills at all levels across global organizations. Self-motivated, value-oriented with a mindset of continuous learning. Technical Expertise:3+ years' technical experience in code development language such as Java, JavaScript, python, reach.js, Groovy Automation: Deep hands-on background in building automation frameworks from scratch (e.g., Selenium). 3+ years' experience in leading a team by providing clear instructions for script development, test data management and automation best practices 2+ years' experience in model-based automation tools such as TOSCA, Worksoft, etc. 3+ years' experience in Java, Selenium/Web driver & Cucumber frameworks, API, Database testing 2+ years' experience in Quality Engineering principles for quality controls by test type injection in a CI/CD pipeline 3+ years' experience in testing deliverables (Test strategy, Plan, RTM, etc.) and test management tools such as HP ALM, JIRA, VersionOne, Rally, etc., and performance testing tool such as Performance Center , Load Runner and JMeter Preferred Skills: Experience with pharmaceutical research and development Experience with enterprise AI/ML programs, including generative AI/LLM applications Our technology teams operate as business partners, proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver services and solutions that help everyone be more productive and enable innovation. Who we are: We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been inventing for lives, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world. What we look for: Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. He