Senior Specialist, Context Engineer

Job Description

Senior Specialist, Context engineering

The Opportunity

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 our companys’ 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

We are seeking a Digital Supply Chain Senior Specialist Context Engineer to design, build, and govern the enterprise context layer (AI, Ontology & Knowledge Graphs) that powers next-generation AI, analytics, and decision intelligence solutions.

This role sits at the intersection of Data Engineering, Ontology Design, Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Technologies, and Agentic AI. The successful candidate will establish the semantic foundation that enables AI systems to understand business concepts, relationships, processes, constraints, and enterprise knowledge.

As a Senior Specialist Context Engineer, you will transform disconnected data into contextual intelligence by creating ontologies, semantic models, knowledge graphs, metadata frameworks, and AI grounding capabilities that enable trusted and explainable AI across the organization.

What you will do in this role :

·       Context and Knowledge Architecture

·       Design semantic models, ontologies, and taxonomies.

·       Define business entities, concepts, relationships, and hierarchies.

·       Establish enterprise-wide semantic standards and reusable patterns.

·       Create contextual representations of business processes and decision flows.

·       Knowledge Graph Engineering

·       Design and implement knowledge graphs.

·       Model complex relationships across business domains.

·       Develop graph schemas that support reasoning and contextual discovery.

·       Enable relationship-based querying and inference.

·       AI Context & Grounding

·       Build context layers that improve AI accuracy and explainability.

·       Develop GraphRAG solutions and semantic retrieval frameworks.

·       Enable enterprise copilots and AI agents with trusted business context.

·       Establish grounding mechanisms for LLMs and autonomous agents.

·       Support memory and reasoning frameworks for AI systems.

·       Data Context Layer Development

·       Create semantic mappings between business concepts and physical data.

·       Integrate metadata, master data, business glossaries, and ontologies.

·       Build contextual services that support decision intelligence solutions.

·       Define semantic APIs and context-serving capabilities.

·       Business Collaboration

·       Facilitate workshops with business stakeholders and SMEs.

·       Capture business vocabulary, processes, and knowledge structures.

·       Translate business understanding into machine-readable semantic models.

·       Foster adoption of semantic and knowledge-driven practices.

·       Governance & Stewardship

·       Establish ontology governance processes.

·       Define standards for semantic modeling and knowledge management.

·       Manage lifecycle, quality, and stewardship of enterprise context assets.

·       Develop best practices for AI-ready knowledge platforms.

·       General

·       Throughout the process from ideation through deployment, the candidate will collaborate with design, business and technical team leaders to identify interdependencies, define, and document requirements thus facilitating robust product delivery.

·       As a member of the Enterprise Orchestration, the Context Engineer establishes the technical capabilities working with various digital teams. Once the capability is established, they will help manage the backlog and guide the SteadyState team to deliver requirements thus enhancing the overall EO capabilities.

·       Results-orientation with the proven ability and reputation for developing plans and implementing them successfully.

·       Create documentation for the solutions you create, enhance and support in line with System Development Lifecycle company standards.

·       Test IT solutions functionalities and analytical capabilities with the business use cases, train the users and document the results.

·       Perform systems analysis and design on supply chain projects and programs

·       Participate in evaluations and proof of concept activities.

What you should have:

·

o   Bachelor's degree in business, information systems or related discipline.

·

o   Experienced in using agile methods to bring new solutions though experimental/Proof of   Concept (POC) stages and subsequent Minimum Viable Product (MVP), scale up and industrialization.

o   Demonstrated ability to collaborate, communicate, supervise and coach across cultures, organizational levels and disciplines.

o   Demonstrated success in building strong relationships across siloes.

o   Proven leadership and people management skills are preferred, along with excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills.

o   Demonstrated ability to solve problems with a sense of ownership, enthusiasm and innovation.

o   Ability to work in a global, multi-cultural, English-speaking environment.

o   Ability to work both independently and collaboratively with a globally dispersed team

o   Self-starter requiring minimal supervision. Demonstrated poise, confidence and professional maturity to interface with mid-level executives

o   Ability to work with US and EU work hours with necessary overlap.

o   7 years in Data Architecture, Information Architecture, Knowledge Engineering, or AI platforms.

o   3 years building ontologies, semantic models, or knowledge graphs.

o   Experience supporting enterprise AI initiatives.

o   Experience working with cross-functional business and technical teams.

Technical Skills

o   Semantic Technologies - Experience with One or more: RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS, SHACL, SPARQL

o   Knowledge Graph Platforms - Experience with one or more: Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, Stardog, GraphDB, TigerGraph , Timbr.ai, Ontotext

o   Experience to Data & Metadata concepts - Data Modeling, Metadata Management, Business Glossaries, Master Data Management, Data Lineage, Data Governance

o   AI & Agentic Technologies - Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), GraphRAG, Vector Databases, Semantic Search, AI Agents, Agent Orchestration Frameworks

o   Programming - Experience with one or more: Python,SQL, Cypher, SPARQL, REST APIs

Primary Skills-  Semantic technologies, Context Engineering

·       Good to have : Python,SQL, Cypher

Building ontologies, semantic models, or knowledge graphs.

o   Experience supporting enterprise AI initiatives.

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.

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 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. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.

Additional location(s) Compensation Information:

Required Skills:

Business Informatics, Business Informatics, Data Engineering, Data Management, Data Science, Data Storage Systems, Data Visualization, Design Applications, Governance Framework, Graph Databases, GraphDB, Graphing, Informatics, Metadata Management, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Neo4j, Ontology, Ontology Development, Ontology Engineering, Product Delivery, Proof of Concept (POC), Python (Programming Language), Semantic Modeling, Semantics, Semantic Technologies {+ 13 more}

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Secondary Language(s) Job Description:

#MSDHYDIT

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully

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.

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

Domestic

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

No Travel Required

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

Job Posting End Date:

11/17/2026 *A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFORE  the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.