2026 Future Talent Program - Agentic AI - Co-Op

The Future Talent Program features Cooperative (Co-op) education that lasts up to 6 months and will include one or more projects. These opportunities in our Research and Development Division can provide you with great development and a chance to see if we are the right company for your long-term goals

The Computational Toxicology group within Nonclinical Drug Safety group at our Company combines toxicology expertise, data science, and AI/ML, including emerging Large Language Model (LLM) and generative AI applications, to enhance the prediction and mechanistic understanding of drug safety risks. Our vision is to accelerate safety assessments, support early drug discovery teams, and reduce reliance on in vivo testing through advanced computational approaches.

We are seeking a highly motivated Co-op student to join the Computational Toxicology team at our Company Research Laboratories. This position offers an exciting opportunity to apply machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and LLM-based reasoning to real-world pharmaceutical safety data. You will contribute to the development of AI pipelines that mine and integrate multimodal toxicology datasets, spanning genomics, metabolomics, chemistry, in vitro/in vivo data, and biomedical literature, to generate mechanistic hypotheses and predictive models of toxicity.

Key responsibilities:

• Develop and evaluate predictive models to assess compound safety risks and identify toxicity mechanisms using multimodal pharmaceutical data.
• Design and implement NLP/LLM pipelines (prompt engineering, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, etc.) to extract insights from unstructured reports and biomedical literature.
• Build and deploy interactive dashboards (e.g., Streamlit, Dash) to visualize and communicate findings to toxicologists, chemists, and project teams.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary scientists across toxicology, chemistry, and data science to translate computational outputs into actionable safety insights.

Required Experience and Skills:

• Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Science, Data Science, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology/Chemistry, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.
• Experienced with NLP and LLM frameworks (e.g., Hugging Face, spaCy, NLTK) and techniques such as prompt design, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Proficient in Python, with strong skills in statistics, data wrangling (pandas/SQL), and model development (scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Familiar with Git/GitHub workflows.
• Passionate about applying AI to improve human safety, reduce animal testing, and transform decision-making in drug discovery.

Please note that this position may be closed before the posted end date or may remain open longer, at the discretion of the company.

Salary range:

The salary range for this role is $39,600.00-$105,500.00 USD

FTP2026

RL2026

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

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U.S. Hybrid Work Model

Effective September 5, 2023, employees in office-based positions in the U.S. will be working a Hybrid work consisting of three total days on-site per week, Monday - Thursday, although the specific days may vary by site or organization, with Friday designated as a remote-working day, unless business critical tasks require an on-site presence.This Hybrid work model does not apply to, and daily in-person attendance is required for, field-based positions; facility-based, manufacturing-based, or research-based positions where the work to be performed is located at a Company site; positions covered by a collective-bargaining agreement (unless the agreement provides for hybrid work); or any other position for which the Company has determined the job requirements cannot be reasonably met working remotely. Please note, this Hybrid work model guidance also does not apply to roles that have been designated as "remote".

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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

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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:
Intern/Co-op (Fixed Term)

Relocation:
No relocation

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:
11/3/2025
*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.

Requisition ID: R369728