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, quality, operational excellence, reliability at scale, and cost management for 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/7part of8 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 stakeholders6 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

• Bachelor6s or Master6s or PHD. in Engineering, Analytics, Data Science, Computational Sciences, Sciences, Computer Science;

• MBA or innovation/entrepreneurial certification or Advanced degrees preferred

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities. Please click here if you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process.

The salary range for this role is

This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employee6s 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 https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.

You can apply for this role through https://jobs.merck.com/us/en (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 Angeles6 Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

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. 

Employee Status:

Relocation:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements: