2026 Future Talent Program - Global Science, Engineering and Commercialization Co-Op

Merck•Upper Gwynedd Township, PA

10h•$39,600 - $105,500•Hybrid

About The Position

The Future Talent Program offers Cooperative (Co-op) education opportunities lasting up to 6 months, including one or more projects within the Manufacturing Division. These opportunities aim to provide significant development and assess suitability for long-term career goals with the company. The company's vision is to positively impact lives globally through innovative medicines, vaccines, and animal health products, striving to be a premier, research-intensive biopharmaceutical company. Core focus areas include diabetes, infectious diseases, oncology, and vaccines in Human Health, and livestock, companion animal, and aquaculture in Animal Health. This co-op experience fosters technical and professional development, involving a Global Science, Engineering and Commercialization role that provides global technical support to vaccine and biologics manufacturing areas within an empowered team culture. Co-ops will work with scientists and engineers in late-stage process development, commercialization, tech transfer and expansion, and commercial manufacturing support, upholding a "Safety First, Quality Always" mindset for continuous improvement and innovation. Global Science, Engineering and Commercialization is responsible for end-to-end technology support for vaccines and biologics, advancing the pipeline of large molecule products, and supporting existing commercial manufacturing and expansion. This includes planning and executing process development studies for commercial-scale process design and characterization, technology transfer to manufacturing sites, and supporting process validation, regulatory approval, and new product launches. Co-ops in GSEC can work in areas such as Biologics Drug Substance Process Development & Commercialization (focused on biologic and vaccine drug substances), Sterile Drug Product Commercialization (focused on sterile drug products including biologics, vaccines, and sterile small molecules), applying engineering, chemistry, and pharmaceutics skills to scale-up processes, developing innovative manufacturing technologies and analytical methods, using process modeling and data analytics, and supporting technology transfer. Another area is Technical Product Leadership, focused on end-to-end support for vaccine and biologic products, collaborating with operations and quality groups on strategic projects, examining issues from diverse perspectives to resolve root causes, and supporting product transfers within the manufacturing network.

Requirements

Currently pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in engineering, science, or related disciplines.
No prior experience is required.
Candidates must have superior technical competency as demonstrated by excellent academic record and work achievement.
Candidates must have strong communication skills, personal character, and ethics.

Nice To Haves

Demonstrated skills in computer programming and/or data science & data analytics.
Ability to work independently and in teams.
Effective problem-solving, collaboration, project management, and written and oral communication skills.
Previous process development, research, or manufacturing experience.
Strong technical competency and a desire to innovate.

Responsibilities

Contributes to the performance and results of a department.
Applies technical skills to align activities with department objectives.
Designing and executing process development and characterization studies.
Authoring technical protocols for studies, including ensuring appropriate design of experiments (DoE), sample size selection, and acceptance criteria.
Managing sample submission and tracking.
Employing statistical tools and methods to analyze results.
Authoring technical reports that can be used as source documentation for regulatory filings.
Participation in development and commercial teams (working group/product council).
Presenting study results and conclusions at team (working group/product council) and department meetings.
Ensuring technical information is clearly understood and integrated into decision making.
Supporting computational modeling work.
Authoring or performing second-person review (SPR) for high-quality regulatory submissions.
Works as a team member on manufacturing investigations, validation activities and/or process improvement projects.
Has ability to examine an issue from diverse perspectives (safety, compliance, automation, equipment, process, and people) in order to best understand and resolve the root cause.
Assures consistent application of standardized work, engineering and process tools and procedures.
Authors and updates technical and manufacturing documents necessary for investigations, process design/definition, engineering studies, process demonstrations, change control and validation.
Supports departmental plans and priorities based on team/department scorecard to address local business, service and operational challenges.
Identifies and resolves technical and operational problems using MPS and lean/six sigma tools.
Effectively collaborates with peers on site and above site as required.
Effectively communicates both verbally and written.
Makes decisions – guided by policies, procedures and department objectives.
Consults on an as-needed basis with next-level manager on more complex decisions.
Ensuring safety when performing experiments in the lab and documentation compliance when performing technical writing.
Contributing to a culture of high performance, out of the box thinking, innovation and learning, empowerment, diversity and inclusion.