Sr. Dir , US Commercial Data Products, Services & Solutions

Merck•North Wales, PA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced, strategic leader to own the end‑to‑end portfolio of commercial data products and services for the US Market aligned Human Health (HH) organization. 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 be responsible to partner with US Market aligned teams from DHH (US Market Engagement, Global Market Engagement, Data Strategy, Data Governance, Commercial AI Capabilities, Digital Data Product Teams, Forecasting, Market Research, Customer Experience, Commercial Architecture et al.), Central Data & Analytics office, HH leadership, IT and Finance to understand data product & context engineering needs for structured and unstructured data, lead delivery of services and solutions, create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, enable operational excellence. 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 (eg. DAI, Gen AI,...) 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 International 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.

Requirements

13+ years in data engineering, data products, commercial analytics or consulting in pharma or life sciences
Bachelor’s or Master’s or PHD. in Engineering, Data Science, or Computer Science, Computational Science, Actuarial sciences
MBA or innovation/entrepreneurial certification preferred
Account Management
Business Intelligence (BI)
Commercial Analytics
Computational Sciences
Database Administration
Data Engineering
Data Management
Data Modeling
Data Strategies
Data Visualization
Delivery Excellence
Design Applications
Information Management
Marketing
Operational Excellence
Process Automations
Product Strategies
Product Vision
Risk Mitigation Strategies
Software Development
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
Strategic Planning
System Designs

Nice To Haves

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, LROP requirements, 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 our company's teams (HH and beyond)
Ability to operate independently and be accountable to leadership for delivery excellence, timelines, quality and good financial stewardship.
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 (e.g., Marketing, Sales, Mkt access, Content, Account management, Activity...)
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 (e.g., AWS, Databricks)
Familiarity with agile product development, API orchestration, and data privacy requirements (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR)

Responsibilities

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.
Partner closely Central Data & Analytics office (CDAO) teams on enterprise data ingestion patterns and data quality standards.
Leads development and management data pipelines on commercial data platforms (e.g., Databricks) 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 Commercial data products, solution and services 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 our company's in terms of innovative approaches to maximize the value of our investments in data and data products