Sr. Dir , US Core Data Domains, Products and Services
Rahway, NJ - USA
Job Summary
Job Description
Role Summary
We are seeking an experienced strategic leader to own and evolve the portfolio of core commercial data domains & data products and services for the US Market aligned Human Health (HH) organization. This role drives data product strategy delivery qualityoperational excellence reliability at scale and cost managementfor high-volume data assets that support marketing sales market access digital customer engagement and other HH teams. The leader will stay up to date with key trends in data modeling engineering and product development (e.g. AI-enabled Data Engineering creating AI-ready data Context engineering Context ops Governance powering GenAI & Agentic AI initiatives). This leader will also work closely with other leaders within the US and International data products services and solutions organization to ensure the needs of the organization are addressed appropriately and efficiently.
Position Responsibilities
Role Overview: Responsible to frame the strategic vision and enable efficient and effective delivery of US-focused Core Human Health (HH) data domains ensuring all commercial data is optimized governed engineered for scale and leveraged for immediate analytical business and GenAI use cases.
Strategic Leadership & Vision:
Define the Portfolio Strategy: Execute a commercial data product portfolio strategy that prioritizes high-value use cases drives ROI on third-party spend and unlocks first-party data value.
Own the Product Lifecycle: Direct the vision roadmaps requirements delivery milestones release management and adoption metrics for a suite of core commercial data products.
Operational Excellence & Cost Management: Drive efficiencies across high-volume data products optimizing data pipeline compute costs and ensuring strict adherence to reliability and SLA standards at enterprise scale.
Demand & Budget Management: Partner with US Market aligned teams from DHH HH IT and Finance to understand broader data needs enable demand management based on resourcing/budgets and negotiate timelines.
Data Architecture & Engineering:
GenAI-Powered Product Delivery: Partner with Foundational Capability teams to leverage GenAI-ready infrastructure (curated semantic layers vector stores RAG pipelines) to build scale and deploy robust GenAI-powered commercial data products.
Medallion Architecture Execution: Develop and manage high-volume data product solutions aligned to the Medallion architecture (gold/part of silver) to enable HH capabilities.
Pipeline Management: Lead development and management of data pipelines on commercial data platforms (e.g. Databricks) ensuring extreme reliability performance and scalability across all data layers.
Product Delivery & Domain Management:
HH Domain Ownership: Oversee data domains and product development for Performance management Marketing mix Campaign analytics Field reporting Patient HCP Account/Payer analytics and Omnichannel execution.
Requirement Translation: Translate commercial stakeholders objectives into clear product requirements and prioritized backlogs; ensure solutions are fit-for-purpose reusable and production-ready.
Cross-Functional Governance:
CDAO & Tech Alignment: Partner closely with Central Data & Analytics Office (CDAO) on ingestion patterns and coordinate with the CTO and Commercial Capabilities teams to maintain technical infrastructure.
Compliance by Design: Embed data governance data quality privacy and compliance requirements (HIPAA CCPA/CPRA where applicable) directly into product design.
Team Leadership & Innovation:
Grow a Multidisciplinary Org: Lead product managers data product engineers and solution architects focused on delivering production-grade highly reliable data services.
Team Health & Global Alignment: Manage delivery execution while working closely with International data organization(s) Central Data teams Divisional teams and Enterprise teams to cascade best practices across teams globally.
Behavioral Competencies required:
Cross-Functional Leadership & Matrix Management:
Collaborative alignment: Proven track record of leading large high-performing cross-functional teams across IT Commercial and Central Data functions.
Enterprise representation: Confidently represents the data organization in Legal Privacy and Global Ethics forums to drive risk mitigation strategies.
Accountability & Delivery Excellence:
Autonomous execution: Operates independently with a strong sense of ownership over timelines product quality and delivery excellence.
Financial stewardship: Highly accountable for managing budgets driving operational efficiencies and optimizing compute/cloud costs at scale.
AI-Native Mindset & Continuous Improvement:
Challenges the status quo: Consistently looks for ways to modernize legacy processes and embed AI-assisted workflows into standard operations.
Adaptable leadership: Navigates changing business priorities while maintaining stability and reliability for core data products.
Strategic Vision with Operational Focus:
Anticipates gaps: Strategically understands the commercial business portfolio and proactively identifies data gaps or opportunities.
Scalable thinking: Balances immediate business needs with the necessity of building long-term scalable and highly reliable architectural solutions.
Functional Competencies Required
Core Healthcare Data Domain Expertise:
Deep domain knowledge: Extensive expertise in core commercial pharma data domains including Patient claims Rx market access HCP specialty pharmacy and CRM data.
Data synthesis: Proven ability to work with enterprise/central data functions to synthesize a wide array of structured and unstructured pharma datasets.
Data Platform & Pipeline Engineering:
Modern cloud architecture: Proven success in building scaling and maintaining modern data platforms and data pipelines (e.g. AWS Databricks).
Enterprise-scale operations: Hands-on experience managing data operations SLAs and data reliability at a massive enterprise scale.
Agile Data Product Management:
End-to-end lifecycle: Deep experience directing the full product lifecycle for data products from vision and requirements to release and adoption.
Modern delivery frameworks: Familiarity with agile product development methodologies and API orchestration for seamless data consumption.
Data Governance & Privacy Security:
Compliance by design: Strong understanding of data privacy requirements (e.g. HIPAA GDPR CCPA/CPRA) and how to engineer compliance directly into data pipelines and products.
Experience Requirements
13 years in data engineering data products commercial analytics or consulting in pharma or life sciences
Educational Requirements
Bachelors or Masters or Engineering Analytics Data Science Computational Sciences Sciences Computer Science;
MBA or innovation/entrepreneurial certification or Advanced degrees preferred
Required Skills:
Business Intelligence (BI) Cost Management Customer Engagement Database Administration Data Engineering Data Governance Data Management Data Modeling Data Pipelines Data Quality Data Visualization Delivery Excellence Design Applications Functional Leadership Information Management Marketing Mix Operational Excellence Prioritization Risk Mitigation Strategies Software Development Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Strategic Leadership System DesignsPreferred Skills:
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The salary range for this role is
$190800.00 - $300300.00This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employees 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 can apply for this role through (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
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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:
RegularRelocation:
No relocationVISA Sponsorship:
NoTravel Requirements:
10%Flexible Work Arrangements:
HybridShift:
Not IndicatedValid Driving License:
NoHazardous Material(s):
n/aJob Posting End Date:
08/18/2026*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFOREthe listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
About Company
Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, New Jersey, USA is known as “Merck” in the United States, Canada & Puerto Rico. We are known as “MSD” in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America & Asia Pacific. We are a global biopharmaceutical leader with a diverse portfolio of prescription medicine ... View more