Job Description
The Position
Join a global healthcare biopharma technology team in Prague as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer. You will own reliability, scalability, and security for critical platforms and applications that support medicines, vaccines, and animal health products worldwide. This role combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership: you’ll drive modernization, shape operational best practices, mentor engineers, and collaborate across products and regions to deliver resilient, high-performing systems.
What will you do?
- Lead reliability efforts: define and own SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, availability goals, and improvement plans for services under your scope.
- Design and implement robust, scalable architectures and automation that minimize operational toil and support rapid delivery.
- Build and maintain IaC, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing to ensure consistent, auditable deployments.
- Drive observability and proactive monitoring: implement metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting that enable data-driven reliability improvements.
- Lead incident response for complex issues, coordinate cross-team resolution, conduct blameless postmortems, and drive preventative actions.
- Establish and codify operational frameworks, runbooks, and standard methodologies to raise operational maturity across teams.
- Coach and mentor SRE and DevOps engineers; foster knowledge sharing and create a pipeline of technical leaders.
- Partner with product engineering, security, platform, and vendor teams to align technology roadmaps, compliance, and lifecycle management (patching, upgrades).
- Perform capacity planning, performance analysis, and troubleshooting for distributed systems and cloud platforms.
- Produce and maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, installation qualification/validation artifacts, and compliance evidence when required.
Qualifications, Skills & Experience Required
- BSc in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or equivalent experience; advanced degree a plus.
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in SRE, Platform, or DevOps engineering with proven ownership of reliability for production systems.
- Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP experience valuable) and cloud-native services.
- Strong skills with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar), Git-based workflows, and mature CI/CD pipelines.
- Demonstrated experience defining and operating SLOs, SLIs, SLAs, and error budget processes.
- Proficiency with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing).
- Solid programming/scripting skills (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, or similar) and experience building automation and tooling.
- Strong knowledge of networking (VPCs, VPNs, load balancing, firewalls) and cloud security best practices and compliance frameworks.
- Experience with platform engineering patterns, multi-tenant platforms, and managing analytics or data platforms is a plus.
- Familiarity with Conversational BI tools, Power Platform, and emerging LLM/Copilot concepts.
- Excellent problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder-management skills; experience working with global, cross-functional teams.
- Relevant certifications (AWS Professional, Kubernetes, etc.) are a plus.
Nice to have
- Prior experience in regulated industries (pharma/healthcare) with understanding of validation and compliance requirements.
- Experience designing or operating cloud-native analytics platforms and multi-tenant services.
- Leadership experience in building and scaling engineering teams or center-of-excellence functions.
What we offer
- Exciting work in a great team, global projects, international environment
- Opportunity to learn and grow professionally within the company globally
- Hybrid working model, flexible role pattern (e.g., even 80% full-time is possible in justified cases)
- Pension and health insurance contributions
- Internal reward system plus referral programme
- 5 weeks annual leave, 5 sick days, 15 days of certified sick leave paid above statutory requirements annually, 40 paid hours annually for volunteering activities, 12 weeks of parental contribution
- Cafeteria for tax free benefits according to your choice (meal vouchers, sport, culture, health, travel, etc.), Multisport Card
- Vodafone, Raiffeisen Bank and Foodora discount programmes
- Up-to-date laptop and iPhone
- Parking in the garage, showers, refreshments, massage chairs, library, music corner
- Competitive salary, incentive pay, and many more
Ready to take up the challenge? Apply now!
Know anybody who might be interested? Refer this job!
Required Skills:
Animal Vaccination, Compliance Frameworks, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Data Engineering, Data Visualization, Design Applications, DevOps Engineering, Distributed Systems, Knowledge Sharing, Performance Analysis, Platform Engineering, Preventive Action, Software Configurations, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, Stakeholder Management, System Designs, System Integration, Technology Roadmap, Testing, Tree Logging
Preferred Skills:
Current Employees apply HERE
Current Contingent Workers apply HERE
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:
10%
Flexible Work Arrangements:
Hybrid
Shift:
Not Indicated
Valid Driving License:
No
Hazardous Material(s):
n/a
Job Posting End Date:
07/27/2026
*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.
