Within DAGS, our AI/ML team drives innovation across disease areas by building biologically grounded and interpretable imaging pipelines. In Immunology, digital pathology plays a critical role in understanding tissue level immune mechanisms and supporting companion diagnostics. We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist with strong expertise in computer vision and biomedical imaging to develop scalable imaging foundation models and interpretable pipelines for immunology and oncology biomarker discovery.

What You’ll Do

• Develop and train imaging foundation models for histopathology, with a focus on immune-relevant tissue and cellular patterns.
• Build segmentation driven and cell-centric pipelines (e.g., immune cell typing, spatial organization, microenvironment analysis).
• Design interpretable modeling workflows that link image derived features to biological hypotheses and clinical endpoints.
• Apply zero-shot and weakly supervised learning methods to extract immune signals from H&E and IHC data.
• Collaborate closely with immunologists, pathologists, and translational teams to ensure biological relevance and interpretability.
• Support imaging biomarker development efforts, including applications toward companion diagnostics.
• Contribute to platform level imaging strategies, QC standards, and best practices within DAGS.
• Share findings through internal forums, publications, and scientific collaborations.

• PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, AI/ML, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genetics & Genomics, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Pharmaceutical Science, or related STEM field with 0+ years postdoctoral experience or Master’s degree with 4+ years of industry experience.
• Strong expertise in computer vision and medical image analysis and/or multimodal data.
• Experience building and/or applying models for segmentation, detection, and representation learning, ideally in histopathology.
• Familiarity with modern deep learning architectures (e.g., transformers, vision foundation models).
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Strong interest in immunology and tissue-based biomarker discovery.
• Ability to communicate complex technical ideas to multidisciplinary scientific partners.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Familiarity with clinical or translational imaging biomarker programs.
• Publications in venues such as MICCAI, CVPR, NeurIPS, ISBI, or related journals.

EligibleforERP, Biomedical Imaging, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Data Science, Data Segmentation, Deep Learning, Digital Pathology, Foundation Models, Image Analysis, Machine Learning (ML), Medical Imaging Analysis, Multimodal, Multimodal Analysis, PyTorch, Representation Learning, Transformer Model, Vision Transformer (ViT)

We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another’s thinking and approach problems collectively.

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The salary range for this role is

$144,800.00 - $227,900.00

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.