Health & Life Sciences Program Advisory Director

Salesforce•New York, NY

1d•$164,000 - $285,300•Hybrid

About The Position

The Health & Life Sciences Program Advisory Director is a senior, executive-facing individual contributor (IC) within the Global Life Sciences Acceleration Hub of Salesforce Professional Services. As an IC, Program Advisory Directors hold no direct reports, and yet expertly advise large numbers of our most senior talent across our most complex customer engagements: multi-workstream transformations, strategic accounts, and enterprise implementations where the margin for error is narrow and the consequences of failure are visible at the C-suite. The Program Advisory Director is engaged across a portfolio of accounts in short-term advisory capacities, providing SME oversight on governance, program management discipline, escalation handling, and risk monitoring. They advise and support Program Execs and delivery teams already on the ground, strengthening governance rigor, surfacing risk, and coaching through escalations. They facilitate and actively participate in Steering Committees and other key governance forums, ensuring disciplined cadence, effective decision-making, and executive alignment across the accounts they advise. For smaller accounts without existing program management roles from Salesforce Professional Services, the role engages for a temporary, defined period to stand up the program, establishing governance structures, instilling program monitoring and risk mitigation processes and cadences, and then transitions ongoing program management to the SI partner, ensuring continuity before stepping back. The ideal candidate will bring a diverse IT and/or Management Consulting background and knowledge of Health & Life Sciences industry trends, leveraging this credibility as a strategic advisor to our customers, partners, and internal teams across Salesforce. The candidate will be able to craft innovative, forward-looking strategies while clearly defining the path forward, leading the changes to IT strategy, policies, processes, people, governance and partnerships, and translate program delivery into measurable business outcomes. Health & Life Science Program Advisory Directors advise and support cross-functional teams deploying cutting-edge digital workforces that bridge the gap between complex biomedical data and actionable healthcare insights, driving the next frontier of life sciences innovation, while leveraging AI tools and agentic workflows themselves to accelerate governance reviews, risk monitoring, and program health tracking across the portfolio of accounts they oversee. Their success is defined by what they deliver, what they prevent, and the customer confidence they command. Your Impact AI and agentic delivery are embedded in how you work: you actively leverage AI tooling and agentic workflows to optimize how your program teams deliver. You reduce manual overhead, accelerate insight, and model the productivity gains customers are investing in Salesforce to achieve. Engagement Success is well-defined and honored: you assess and strengthen the program strategy, management approach, and governance structures already in place, advising the accountable Program Exec/delivery lead, and align on the objectives and outcomes of the engagement as well as the KPIs to measure its success. Customer outcomes strengthened through accountable advisory support: you act as a trusted SME advisor to the executive-facing delivery owner, strengthening governance, risk visibility, and escalation handling, without displacing the accountable Program Exec if one is assigned to the program. You will advise Program Execs and manage communications within Salesforce up to the CxO level regarding expectations, program performance, governance, and issue escalation and resolution during the course of delivery. You earn trust through consistently-accurate forecasting, honest risk communication, and follow-through. The delivery team performs at a higher level because you're in it: you effectively lead, inspire, and uplift Salesforce Professional Services team members — coaching them to perform at a higher level while contributing to the internal processes, artifacts, and methodologies that raise the floor for service delivery across our most strategic accounts. What you learn and implement travels. The full engagement is yours to guide: you are accountable for overseeing and improving the quality of end-to-end service delivery and ensure program risk is identified and managed effectively. You help protect bid-versus-delivered margin on the accounts you advise by surfacing risk and governance gaps early. Value delivered translates into real adoption and consumption: you drive the transformational changes, especially around AI and agentic capabilities, needed to achieve customers' objectives, informed by deep industry and product expertise. You align IT strategy, governance, processes, and stakeholder decisions to ensure system satisfaction, adoption, and consumption directly deliver profound customer impact. Risk is managed before it manages you: you anticipate, mitigate, and manage risk to Salesforce and the customer, taking decisive program action to address risk profiles ensuring every customer achieves successful desired outcomes. You raise signals with a recommended path, not just a problem statement. Surfacing a risk is success; being surprised by one is not. White space becomes pipeline and internal alignment sustains it: you proactively build and expand business relationships which enable Salesforce to support, transform and win business that delivers mutual value, working hand in hand with Sales, Success, Technology & Product, and Support to drive customer adoption initiatives and maintain alignment as One Salesforce. You ensure alignment with Sales and develop multi-threaded executive relationships within accounts to accelerate value and improve customer outcomes. Delivery-originated pipeline is a portfolio metric, and you are one of its primary sources.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience applying AI productivity tools, automation, or agentic workflows within a professional services or program delivery context.
Able to articulate measurable impact on delivery efficiency, team output, or customer outcomes.
12+ years of professional services or consulting delivery experience, with deep expertise in program execution across financials, risk, scope, and customer outcomes, applied in an advisory or delivery-leadership capacity.
Demonstrated track record leading large, complex programs ($10M+) with measurable outcomes that have positively impacted the business.
5+ years leading large, cross-functional delivery teams across multiple geographies and workstreams, with the ability to lead both direct and indirect team members, including third-party system integrators, without positional authority.
Direct experience managing program financials at the engagement level, including forecasting to budget, financial management, revenue control, earned value analysis, contingency management, and delivered-versus-bid margin.
End-to-end knowledge of the concepts, practices, procedures, and deliverables associated with system development, implementation, and operational readiness, including the ability to partner with technical teams on comprehensive operational planning and address technical issues as they arise.
Proven ability to lead steering committee and executive-level customer relationships, including the ability to conduct difficult data-driven conversations around budget, resources, timelines, and formal outcomes and drive decisions under pressure.
Demonstrated ability to operate across multiple concurrent accounts/engagements simultaneously, context-switching between short-term advisory assignments and longer-term SME oversight roles.
Experience conducting structured sales-to-delivery handoffs or equivalent intake processes that establish delivery from a position of clarity.
Demonstrated ability to identify and escalate delivery risk proactively with clear examples of surfacing issues early enough to course-correct outcomes before they reach the customer.
Ability to collaborate effectively across global time zones and geographies.
Outstanding executive presence and communication skills, verbal and written, including the ability to lead high-powered workshops and effectively tailor messaging based on audience.
Bachelor's degree required.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience delivering Agentforce or equivalent AI platform implementations at the enterprise level.
Ability to credibly advise customers on agentic enterprise transformations.
PMP, PgMP, or SAFe certification, or equivalent demonstrated program management discipline applied at scale across long-duration, high-complexity engagements; PMI standards and SPSM methodology are the dual frameworks this role enforces daily.
Agile SCRUM Master certification.
10+ years using and/or implementing the core Salesforce products (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud), ideally as a consultant, with a significant understanding of the Salesforce platform in order to influence strategic and value discussions at a management/executive level.
Salesforce platform certifications (Admin, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing, etc.).
Health & Life Sciences domain expertise sufficient to credibly advise at the executive level on industry trends, regulatory considerations, and the strategic implications of technology transformation within the vertical.
Experience operating in outcomes-based or fixed-fee delivery models where margin is set at the proposal and protected through execution discipline — not recouped through change orders after the fact.
Demonstrated ability to negotiate and resolve conflict in a delivery context — including change order negotiation, scope dispute resolution, and steering committee decision-forcing.

Responsibilities

Provide SME oversight on governance, program management discipline, escalation handling, and risk monitoring.
Advise and support Program Execs and delivery teams, strengthening governance rigor, surfacing risk, and coaching through escalations.
Facilitate and actively participate in Steering Committees and other key governance forums.
Stand up programs for smaller accounts, establishing governance structures, and instilling program monitoring and risk mitigation processes.
Craft innovative, forward-looking strategies and define the path forward for IT strategy, policies, processes, people, governance, and partnerships.
Translate program delivery into measurable business outcomes.
Advise and support cross-functional teams deploying digital workforces that bridge biomedical data and healthcare insights.
Leverage AI tools and agentic workflows to accelerate governance reviews, risk monitoring, and program health tracking.
Assess and strengthen program strategy, management approach, and governance structures.
Align on engagement objectives, outcomes, and KPIs.
Act as a trusted SME advisor to executive-facing delivery owners.
Manage communications within Salesforce up to the CxO level regarding expectations, program performance, governance, and issue escalation/resolution.
Lead, inspire, and uplift Salesforce Professional Services team members, coaching them to perform at a higher level.
Contribute to internal processes, artifacts, and methodologies that raise the floor for service delivery.
Oversee and improve the quality of end-to-end service delivery.
Ensure program risk is identified and managed effectively.
Help protect bid-versus-delivered margin by surfacing risk and governance gaps early.
Drive transformational changes, especially around AI and agentic capabilities, to achieve customer objectives.
Align IT strategy, governance, processes, and stakeholder decisions to ensure system satisfaction, adoption, and consumption.
Anticipate, mitigate, and manage risk to Salesforce and the customer.
Take decisive program action to address risk profiles.
Proactively build and expand business relationships to support, transform, and win business.
Work with Sales, Success, Technology & Product, and Support to drive customer adoption initiatives.
Ensure alignment with Sales and develop multi-threaded executive relationships within accounts.
Oversee and improve the quality of end-to-end service delivery and ensure program risk is identified and managed effectively.