Senior Director , International Commercial Data products, Services & Solutions

Job Description

Role Overview:
 

 We are seeking an experienced, strategic leader to own the end‑to‑end portfolio of commercial data products and services for the Human Health (HH) organization (global scope responsible for all markets across the world outside the US). This role drives product strategy, delivery, quality and adoption for data assets that support marketing, sales, market access, digital, Customer engagement, patient services, Health equity and other HH teams. The role will also be responsible to partner with various Market aligned teams from DHH, HH, IT and Finance to understand the broader data solution needs, enable demand management based on available resourcing, and budgets, negotiate timelines and manage delivery of services/solutions. The Senior Director will lead cross‑functional teams to build scalable, compliant, and business‑ready data products that accelerate commercial decision‑making and measurable outcomes across HH.  The leader in this role should have prior experience demonstrating disciplined demand management and value creation/realization, optimize resourcing & spend to stay within budget, negotiate timelines and manage delivery of services/solutions. The Senior Director will lead cross‑functional teams to build scalable, compliant, and business‑ready data products that accelerate commercial decision‑making and measurable outcomes across HH.  The leader will also be responsible for understanding key trends across healthcare and other industry verticals and be responsible to make our data eco-system AI and gen AI ready with the right semantics and context.
 

 The person in this role will also collaborate with other leaders in the Data Strategy, Governance and Commercial data Products & Innovation organization, not limited to the US Commercial Data Product and Services lead, to set up the framework to share best practices on building, management and scaling of Data products & services, demand management and delivery excellence.
 

 What will you do:

• Define and 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.

• Develop and manage data product solutions (Analytical ready data sets and Solution ready data sets) to enable HH capabilities & solutions.

• Ensure the data across our eco-system is AI ready with the right meta data, semantics and context.

• Enables out of the box systematized insights to support our inline and launch portfolio.

• Knowledge and experience leveraging AI and agentic AI to drive task automation, process automation and, if necessary, complete reimagination of the ideation to development to deployment and enablement process of the data product life cycle.

• Partners closely CDO teams on enterprise data ingestion patterns and data quality standards.

• Leads development and management data pipelines on commercial data platforms (e.g., Databricks, RedShift) and shared services.

• Ensures reliability and scalability of ingestion, transformation, and data workflows across data layers.

• Coordinates with CTO and Digital Human Health teams to maintain technical infrastructure and enable product roadmap.

• Own product lifecycle for a suite of commercial data products: product vision, roadmaps, requirements, delivery milestones, release management and adoption metrics.

• Lead and grow a multidisciplinary organization (product managers, data product engineers, and solution architects) focused on delivering production‑grade data services.

• Translate commercial stakeholders’ objectives into clear product requirements and prioritized backlogs; ensure solutions are fit‑for‑purpose, reusable and production ready.

• Embed data governance, data quality, privacy and compliance requirements (HIPAA, CCPA/CPRA where applicable) into product design — “compliance by design.”

• Promote standardization and reusability through product templates, documentation, data catalogs, and developer/consumer onboarding playbooks.

• Partner with US Market aligned teams from DHH, HH, IT and Finance to understand the broader data solution needs, enable demand management based on available resourcing, and budgets, negotiate timelines and manage delivery of services/solutions.

• Understand key trends (eg. AI, Gen AI,...) across  healthcare and other industry verticals and be able to translate that for the company in terms of innovative approaches to maximize the value of our investments in data and data products

What should you have:

• Strategic understanding of our business portfolio and ability to anticipate data gaps/opportunities for our product portfolio

• Strategic planning and prioritization of demand and innovation aligned to TA needs and platform evolution

• Able to drive risk mitigation strategies and represent a Digital/Analytics org in Legal, Privacy, and Global Ethics forums

• Able to attract, develop and grow talent and lead large and high performing cross functional teams in matrixed organizations

• Collaborate with cross functional teams across DHH, CTO, Enterprise teams and other teams (HH and beyond)

• Ability to operate independently and be accountable to leadership for delivery excellence, timelines, quality and good financial stewardship.

Functional Competencies Required

• Ability and experience leading teams with an AI native mindset and ability to challenge the status quo and enable a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

• Experience in working with enterprise/central data functions, a wide array of structured and unstructured data used across pharma and biotech companies, to support key programs and initiatives.

• Understanding of how data layers support downstream use cases in brand, forecasting, and patient support

• Hands-on experience with developing data platforms, including FAIR, consented, & payer data integration

• Deep expertise in commercial pharma data domains with extensive experience in applied data and insights using real world data assets

• Experience with data strategy, product engineering, and digital innovation programs

• Proven success in building and scaling modern data platforms and pipelines.

• Familiarity with agile product development, Gen AI & Agentic AI, Agent to Agent communications, API orchestration, and data privacy requirements.
  
   Experience Requirements: 3+ years in data engineering, data products, commercial analytics or consulting in pharma or life sciences

   Educational Requirements: Bachelor’s or Master’s or PHD. in Engineering, Data Science, or Computer Science, Computational Science, Actuarial sciences, Information Technology

MBA or innovation/entrepreneurial certification preferred

Who We Are:

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada, and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases. Today, we continue to advance innovative health solutions that improve and save lives around the world.

What We Look For:
Imagine starting each day knowing your work helps save and improve lives. Here, you can bring your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, and scientific curiosity to collaborate with diverse colleagues united by a common purpose. Our Oncology team is constantly evolving—if you are intellectually curious, resilient, and driven to make a meaningful impact, we invite you to join us and help shape the future of cancer care in Asia Pacific.

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

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. 

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