2027 Future Talent Program - Computer Scientist - Agentic & Augmented Authoring Systems - Co-op
West Point, PA
Internship
Onsite
Intern
Merck is a pharmaceutical company whose Research and Development Division includes Nonclinical Drug Safety and Digital Operations and Innovation teams. The Computer Science Co-op will help develop agentic and augmented authoring systems that retrieve, synthesize, and format nonclinical safety data, while building AI-driven pipelines and collaborating with data scientists and scientific subject-matter experts.
Responsibilities
Design and implement agentic workflows and orchestration pipelines to automate the retrieval, synthesis, and formatting of nonclinical safety data
Develop robust data extraction pipelines in Python to parse and clean structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from diverse scientific sources
Evaluate and benchmark LLM outputs for accuracy, formatting consistency, and alignment with strict nonclinical reporting templates
Collaborate closely with fellow data scientists and scientific SMEs to translate manual document-authoring steps into automated, step-by-step agent tools and skills
Participate in agile sprints, contribute to team code reviews, and maintain clean, production-grade documentation via GitHub
Qualification
Required
**Education:** Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, or a highly quantitative, research-focused field
**Programming:** Strong proficiency in Python programming with a focus on clean, modular, and well-documented code
**Data structures:** Solid understanding of data structures and proficiency in manipulating structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
**AI & Orchestration:** Hands-on experience working with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, agentic tool use, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, etc.)
**Problem Solving:** Strong analytical and research skills, particularly when dealing with noisy, unstructured, or ambiguous data sources
**Collaboration:** Exceptional communication skills with the ability to bridge the gap between technical AI development and scientific domains
Preferred
Experience with vector databases and document embedding techniques
Experience with text processing, OCR, and principles of NLP and NLP evaluation (ROUGE, BLEU, etc.)
Experience with cloud services (AWS/GCP) and version control using Git/GitHub
Exposure to building lightweight developer UIs and dashboards for analytics and prototype/demo usage
Benefits
Hands-on experience with cutting-edge AI and cloud technologies
Mentorship from experienced data scientists and software engineers
Collaborative and inclusive team environment
Potential for future full-time opportunities with our Company
Merck is a biopharmaceutical company that offers medicines and vaccines for various diseases.
