Director, Global Applications

Waters Corporation•,

2d•$139,000 - $232,000

About The Position

The Director, Global Applications & Scientific Operations leads MSD's worldwide applications strategy and operating model. This leader builds a connected scientific community across Global Applications, R&D Applications, and Regional Field Applications, aligning talent and priorities to deliver annual commercial commitments while strengthening long-term innovation, capability, and customer impact. The Director partners with Commercial, R&D, Product Management, Marketing, Service, and Quality to translate customer workflows and market needs into applications priorities, new-product requirements, launch readiness, reusable scientific content, and capability investments. The role balances immediate business needs with a rolling three-year plan for talent, technology, scientific novelty, and operational improvement.

Requirements

Advanced degree in materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, polymer science, or a related scientific discipline.
Significant leadership experience in applications, R&D, product development, scientific operations, or a technical commercial organization, including leadership of global or highly matrixed teams.
Demonstrated success translating customer workflows, market needs, and commercial priorities into portfolio, product, capability, content, and resource decisions.
Strong people-development, succession-planning, change-leadership, and organizational-design capabilities, with the ability to influence across solid-line and dotted-line relationships.
Executive-level communication and stakeholder-management skills, with scientific credibility among customers, scientists, commercial leaders, and external experts.

Nice To Haves

PhD.
Experience in thermal analysis, rheology, or adjacent materials-characterization technologies and markets.

Responsibilities

Align global applications talent, technical expertise, and capacity with priority markets, strategic opportunities, customer escalations, and annual operating plan commitments; establish transparent prioritization and impact measures.
Define the global operating model, including strategy, roles, decision rights, governance, planning cadences, support tiers, and handoffs across Global, R&D, and Regional Field Applications while preserving regional commercial accountability.
Partner with regional leaders through dotted-line relationships to align technical standards, talent development, resource deployment, field training, escalation support, and reusable content priorities.
Ensure delivery of field training and sales-training content; set priorities for market-relevant collateral supporting in-market products, including webinars, seminars, technical tips, web series, application notes, and workflow guidance.
Lead, coach, and develop global scientific talent; establish competency models, succession plans, career pathways, mentoring, onboarding, and skill-based development programs to support mobility and retention.
Sponsor the worldwide framework for creating, reviewing, approving, finding, reusing, maintaining, and retiring applications knowledge and training assets; promote collaboration and reduce duplicated effort across regions.
Own a rolling three-year applications plan for scientific novelty and new-product introduction execution; ensure programs include customer workflows, validated methods, reference data, training, content, and regional readiness before launch.
Represent the scientific customer in research and new product development; own workflow definition and applications input to product specifications, data validation, feasibility studies, field testing, ideation, and design reviews.
Increase the team's external presence through conferences, publications, webinars, standards activities, collaborations, and key opinion leader relationships; align targeted campaigns with strategic markets and portfolio priorities.
Use demand, capacity, quality, adoption, training, content, and customer-impact metrics to identify gaps, improve processes, manage short- and long-term resource needs, and communicate risks and trade-offs to leadership.