Senior Specialist, Image Data Analytics

Merck • Cambridge, MA

9d • $129,000 - $203,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

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.
As a Senior Specialist in Image Data Analytics, you will have the opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking research and development, leveraging advanced data analytics to support drug discovery, safety, and efficacy assessment.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Data Science, Bioinformatics, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a closely related quantitative discipline.
• Demonstrated application of computational methods to biomedical imaging or high-dimensional biological data in an academic, pharmaceutical, biotech, or healthcare setting.
• Strong proficiency in Python and the modern scientific computing stack (NumPy, SciPy, pandas), with hands-on experience in PyTorch and/or TensorFlow or similar frameworks.
• Proven ability to conduct independent scientific research, including problem formulation, method development, validation, and interpretation.
• Experience leading or owning analytical workstreams with minimal supervision.
• Strong scientific communication skills, including technical writing and oral presentation to interdisciplinary audiences.

Nice To Haves

• Specialized experience in microscopy, digital pathology (H&E, IHC, multiplex imaging) and/or radiological imaging (CT, MRI, PET).
• Experience with modern deep learning paradigms, including transformers, foundation models, self-supervised learning, VLMs, and multimodal architectures.
• Familiarity with MLOps, reproducible research, and model governance in regulated or semi-regulated environments.
• Experience with HPC, GPU acceleration, and cloud-native analytics.
• Exposure to spatial biology, bioinformatics, genomics, or multi-omics integration.
• Record of peer-reviewed publications, scientific software contributions, or open-source development.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring graduate students, or junior scientists.

Responsibilities

• Lead the scientific design and implementation of advanced image analytics methods for discovery, translational, and clinical research.
• Develop novel or adapted algorithms in computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, signal processing, and statistics for multimodal biomedical data.
• Design reproducible, scalable analytical workflows that integrate imaging data with experimental, molecular, and clinical metadata.
• Collaborate deeply with domain scientists to define scientific questions, translate them into analytical strategies, and interpret results in biological and clinical context.
• Serve as a technical and scientific authority within cross-functional project teams, driving solutions from concept through deployment.
• Critically evaluate internal methods and external tools/vendors through benchmarking, validation, and scientific rigor.
• Identify opportunities for innovation, propose new analytical directions, and contribute to the long-term technical strategy of the team.
• Author high-quality scientific reports, internal documentation, and presentations; contribute to peer-reviewed publications as appropriate.
• Mentor junior scientists and collaborators, providing guidance in methodology, best practices, and scientific thinking.

Benefits

• medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family)
• retirement benefits, including 401(k)
• paid holidays
• vacation
• compassionate and sick days
• annual bonus
• long-term incentive

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree