User Experience Designer, Data Context Layer

Job Description

Role Overview

This role is part of a broader enterprise initiative to establish a Data Context Layer (DCL) — a foundational capability designed to provide consistent, reusable, and scalable context across enterprise data products.

The DCL is intended to address challenges related to data fragmentation, lack of shared semantics, and inconsistent interpretation of data across systems and products. It establishes a unified layer for representing context, relationships, and meaning, enabling downstream products to operate with greater consistency, interoperability, and intelligence.

In addition, the DCL plays a critical role in enabling agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise by providing the structured context and semantic grounding required for intelligent agents to operate reliably. This includes ensuring that agent-driven workflows and decisions are based on consistent, governed, and interpretable data context, reducing risks associated with fragmentation, ambiguity, and lack of control.

Within this initiative, we are seeking a UX/Service Designer to design the end-to-end experience for an enterprise capability that enables teams to publish, discover, and consume standardized data context through self-service. This role will focus on defining user journeys, service blueprints, interaction models, prototype user interfaces, and operating processes that make the platform usable, trustworthy, and scalable across the enterprise.

The ideal candidate has strong service design skills, experience working with technical platforms, and the ability to translate complex data/semantic/AI concepts into intuitive user experiences. Familiarity with agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering is required, as the service must support AI-enabled workflows that depend on high-quality, governed context.

Key Responsibilities

• Design the end-to-end service experience for the enterprise data context self-service capability.

• Map user journeys across publishers, consumers, administrators, and governance stakeholders.

• Develop service blueprints that connect front-stage user interactions with back-stage processes, systems, and support models.

• Define intuitive workflows for:

  • publishing context

  • discovering context

  • requesting access

  • validating context quality

  • managing versions and updates

• Collaborate with product, engineering, data, governance, and security teams to ensure the service is usable, scalable, and operationally sound.

• Identify pain points, service gaps, and opportunities to simplify adoption across teams.

• Design experience patterns that support both human users and AI-enabled workflows, including agentic systems that rely on structured context.

• Contribute to standards and design principles for self-service, discoverability, consistency, and trust.

• Prototype and test service flows with users and stakeholders.

• Help define service metrics such as task completion, adoption, support load, and time-to-onboard.

• Support the transition from concept to production by ensuring the service design is operationally feasible and well documented.

Minimum Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree

• 5+ years of experience in service design, experience design, or related design strategy roles.

• Experience designing complex enterprise services, digital platforms, or self-service experiences.

• Strong ability to map journeys, service blueprints, and operational processes.

• Strong ability to mockup user interfaces using Figma or Lovable like tools

• Comfort working with technical teams on data platforms, APIs, workflows, or infrastructure-enabled services.

• Familiarity with data context, metadata, ontology, or semantic concepts.

• Working knowledge of agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering concepts.

• Strong facilitation, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

• Ability to simplify complex systems into clear, human-centered service experiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing enterprise data, AI, or knowledge platforms.

• Familiarity with ontologies, OWL, RDF, knowledge graphs, MCP, A2A, or Timbr-like technologies.

• Experience with governance-heavy or regulated environments.

• Background in design systems, service blueprinting, journey mapping, and usability research.

• Experience supporting AI-enabled or agentic workflows.

• Familiarity with operational service design, including support models, escalation paths, and adoption planning.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means:

• the service is intuitive and easy to navigate for different user groups

• teams can self-serve context with minimal friction

• the service works well across human and AI-driven workflows

• the experience is consistent, trusted, and scalable across the enterprise

• back-end processes and front-end interactions are aligned

• adoption grows while support needs decrease

Required Skills:

Applied Engineering, Client Counseling, Communication, Content Writing, Context Mapping, Data Visualization, Enterprise Data, Experience Design, Knowledge Graph, Measurement Analysis, Ontology, Production Operations, Prompt Engineering, Publishing Process, Service Blueprinting, Stakeholder Management, Strategic Planning, User Experience (UX) Design, User Experience Analysis, User Experience Evaluation, User Research

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities. Please click here if you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process.

As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.  As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.  For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:

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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

$117,000.00 - $184,200.00

This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, government requirements, and business or organizational needs.

The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits.  Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. More information about benefits is available at https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.

You can apply for this role through https://jobs.merck.com/us/en (or via the Workday Jobs Hub if you are a current employee). The application deadline for this position is stated on this posting.

San Francisco Residents Only: We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

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:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

10%

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

1st - Day

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

N/A

Job Posting End Date:

07/7/2026

*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.