Director, Drug Delivery System Strategy & Planning.

Gilead Sciences•Foster City, CA

About The Position

The Director will serve an important role in developing, networking, and executing global strategies that expand and advance the company's ability to deliver robust, competitive technologies in drug delivery and combination products across Gilead’s pharmaceutical asset pipeline and portfolio. This role will serve as a critical bridge between Drug Delivery and Commercial, Medical, and Pharmaceutical Development & Manufacturing (PDM) and related strategy teams. Using strong business acumen and foundational technical expertise, the successful candidate will work collaboratively with cross-functional product teams to identify drug delivery system options and help shape the product system strategy. The candidate will also work across organizational boundaries to identify opportunities for differentiated product-system solutions and develop business cases to help drive strategic investment decisions in the most promising solutions. Through this multi-faceted role, this individual will help to ensure a seamless continuum from commercial strategy to the front-end innovation pipeline, and on to product development and commercialization.

Requirements

Strong business acumen with sufficient technical depth in science, engineering, drug delivery, and/or combination product development to translate complex inputs into practical product-system recommendations.
Self-motivated, organized, creative, open-minded, patient-focused, results-oriented, and able to demonstrate high learning agility in ambiguous early-stage asset environments.
Proven ability to lead through dotted lines, build trust-based cross-functional relationships, and influence decisions across Commercial, Medical, PDM, DPP, and leadership stakeholders.
Strong verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to synthesize technical, market, user, and operational inputs into concise decision-ready recommendations.
Working knowledge of FDA, EMA, and cGMP standards for combination products.
Master’s Degree in business, science, or engineering and a minimum of ten (10) years of relevant industry experience; alternatively, a Bachelor’s Degree in science or engineering with a minimum of twelve (12) years of relevant industry experience.

Nice To Haves

Master’s Degree in business, science, or engineering.
Sufficient experience in business-centric roles may be considered in lieu of a business degree.
Demonstrated experience in innovation, development, or commercialization of combination devices or product-system solutions from both technical and strategic perspectives.

Responsibilities

Contribute to building strategic thought partnerships across Commercial, Marketing, Medical, Global Value & Access, Program Strategy Teams, the broader DPP organization, and other PDM functions to influence program strategy decisions and advance holistic, competitive product-system solutions.
Serve as the DPP representative on early-stage (pre-pivotal) PDM programs.
Advise on and shape product system strategy and Target Product Profile (TPP) development, ensuring early product system decisions are grounded in patient, market, technical and execution considerations.
Lead teams of scientists, engineers and project managers through dotted lines, to lead scenario planning and business case development for PDM and Gilead Asset Team decision-making, translating technical, commercial, user, and operational inputs into clear product system options and recommendations.
Monitor the development pipeline and maintain an evolving product roadmap and forecast for DPP across therapeutic areas, linking near-term asset needs with long-term innovation and launch readiness.
Monitor commercial launches, lifecycle management needs, competitive intelligence, and market/user preference research to generate insights and inform product system strategy and recommendations for PDM program teams and the Device Innovation team.
Partner closely with Human Factors Engineering, as well as other DPP functions, to identify critical unmet user needs across all therapeutic areas where innovation in product system design can delight and enhance the user experience.