Head of Vivarium (all genders) Darmstadt

 

Work Your Magic with us!  

 

Ready to explore, break barriers, and discover more? We know you’ve got big plans – so do we! Our colleagues across the globe love innovating with science and technology to enrich people’s lives with our solutions in Healthcare, Life Science, and Electronics. Together, we dream big and are passionate about caring for our rich mix of people, customers, patients, and planet. That's why we are always looking for curious minds that see themselves imagining the unimaginable with us.  

 

United As One for Patients, our purpose in Healthcare is to help create, improve and prolong lives. We develop medicines, intelligent devices and innovative technologies in therapeutic areas such as Oncology, Neurology and Fertility. Our teams work together across 6 continents with passion and relentless curiosity in order to help patients at every stage of life. Joining our Healthcare team is becoming part of a diverse, inclusive and flexible working culture, presenting great opportunities for personal development and career advancement across the globe.

 

You will be responsible for leading the animal facility at our main research site in Darmstadt as part of our R&D Site Operations team.

 

Your role:

• Manage the animal facilities at our headquarters in Darmstadt, aiming to make it a leading site in terms of animal welfare and sustainability, constantly modernizing it.
• Be responsible for managing your employees, as well as overseeing service providers, procurement processes, logistics, and the necessary budget.
• Implement and oversee local processes that comply with regulatory and corporate requirements.
• Enable our scientists to develop urgently needed medications under the best possible conditions and ensure that the data from our animal experiments are of the highest relevance, always originating from holistically healthy animals and collected by dedicated and satisfied employees through your collegial yet strong leadership.
• Significantly shape your future work environment by realizing our state-of-the-art consolidated animal husbandry facility in our new Translational Science Center, which will be ready for occupancy in 2026.
• Enable the continuous improvement of all processes and ensure that all employees are trained to the latest standards of technology, ethics, and quality.
• Ensure guideline-compliant transparency and continuous audit readiness with your team and take responsibility for the AAALAC program for the site.
• Prepare processes with your team and with the support of experts for dealing with potential risks, incidents, or crises to ensure business continuity.
• Audit and assess animal husbandries internationally as an expert together with colleagues from other functions.
• Play a key role in our local animal welfare committee and represent the site in our global Vivarium Board as part of an international team and collaborate with our corporate functions to continuously improve and fulfill our strategic goals for Merck Healthcare and as One-Merck.
• Have extensive development opportunities within the company, as well as in consortia, organizations such as AAALAC, or working groups for the development of guidelines.

 

Who you are: 

• Veterinarian - specialized in laboratory animal science, accepted by local authorities (an ongoing, not yet fully completed training to become a veterinary specialist in laboratory animal science could be an alternative).<