Job Description

The Future Talent Program features Co-operative (Co-op) education that lasts up to 6 months and will include one or more projects. These opportunities in our Research and Development Division can provide you with great development and a chance to see if we are the right company for your long-term goals.

Nonclinical Drug Safety (NDS) helps advance high-quality drug candidates into development by defining the nonclinical safety and selectivity of lead compounds. NDS employees evaluate Lead Op candidates and preclinical toxicity of drug development candidates, providing a mechanistic understanding of drug-induced toxicity and assessing implications for human safety. NDS provides collaborative research in animal model development, veterinary medical and animal care, and research facility management. NDS also responds to regulatory questions in support of drug registration.

The Digital Operations and Innovation (DOI) team within NDS Operations comprises a talented group of data scientists dedicated to leveraging scientific and operational data to reduce administrative burden, improve the findability and accessibility of data, and discover and implement innovative applications of AI to modernize and advance our business.

Position Overview: 

We seek a talented and motivated Computer Science Co-op to join our team for a six-month role. This position will contribute to our efforts to develop an agentic, augmented authoring system supporting Nonclinical Drug Safety (NDS). The goal of this effort is to drive towards a "zero-draft" process that retrieves, combines, and formats key data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources into a consistent template for our scientists. The ideal candidate will actively participate in regular sprints to design and refine agents, propose creative solutions to agent-based workflows, and work closely with scientific and operational SMEs.

In this role, you will be a valued contributor to a visible and necessary effort aimed at modernizing how nonclinical safety fulfills its critical role in the development of safe medicines for our patients. Your work will help produce stable, reliable, and consistent AI-driven pipelines that accelerate our reporting timelines and build technology at the cutting edge of our field.

The ideal candidate will have experience with the principles of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in addition to agent-based concepts including orchestration frameworks (such as LangChain, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, or equivalent), tool calling, and API integration. Strong Python coding and documentation skills are essential. Familiarity with AWS and Google services, GitHub, LLMs, and vector databases is an additional advantage. Familiarity with nonclinical drug safety, report authoring, and summarization is a strong advantage.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and implement agentic workflows and orchestration pipelines to automate the retrieval, synthesis, and formatting of nonclinical safety data.

• Develop robust data extraction pipelines in Python to parse and clean structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from diverse scientific sources.

• Evaluate and benchmark LLM outputs for accuracy, formatting consistency, and alignment with strict nonclinical reporting templates.

• Collaborate closely with fellow data scientists and scientific SMEs to translate manual document-authoring steps into automated, step-by-step agent tools and skills.

• Participate in agile sprints, contribute to team code reviews, and maintain clean, production-grade documentation via GitHub.

Required Qualifications:

• Education: Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, or a highly quantitative, research-focused field.

• Programming: Strong proficiency in Python programming with a focus on clean, modular, and well-documented code.

• Data structures: Solid understanding of data structures and proficiency in manipulating structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

• AI & Orchestration: Hands-on experience working with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, agentic tool use, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, etc.).

• Problem Solving: Strong analytical and research skills, particularly when dealing with noisy, unstructured, or ambiguous data sources.

• Collaboration: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to bridge the gap between technical AI development and scientific domains.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with vector databases and document embedding techniques.

• Experience with text processing, OCR, and principles of NLP and NLP evaluation (ROUGE, BLEU, etc.).

• Experience with cloud services (AWS/GCP) and version control using Git/GitHub.

• Exposure to building lightweight developer UIs and dashboards for analytics and prototype/demo usage.

What You'll Gain:

• Cutting-Edge Experience: Deep, hands-on experience building and deploying production-grade LLM agents and advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.

• Highly Valued Domain Knowledge: Practical knowledge of how to navigate enterprise data engineering and AI development within a secure, highly regulated healthcare environment.

• Real-World Impact: A clear understanding of how modern generative AI accelerates drug safety reporting, directly shortening timelines to bring life-saving medicines to patients.

What We Offer:

• Hands-on experience with cutting-edge AI and cloud technologies

• Mentorship from experienced data scientists and software engineers

• Collaborative and inclusive team environment

• Potential for future full-time opportunities with our Company

Please note that this position may be closed before the posted end date or may remain open longer, at the discretion of the company.

Salary range:
The salary range for this role is $39,108 through $111,111.

FTP2027

RL2027

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

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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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