Director, Data

Job Description

Our IT team operates as a business partner proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver the services and solutions that help everyone to be more productive and enable innovation.

Our Company’s enterprise data and analytics function, “CDNA” is responsible for solving enterprise-wide data and analytics problems in a customer-centric, product-driven manner. CDNA is an enterprise accelerator for our Company data and analytics organizations with scope from data discovery and identification to data acquisition and integration, advanced analytics, consumption and insights, and cognitive capabilities.

CDNA is an entrepreneurial organization within our Company, which offers enterprise-wide analytics products, capabilities, and services for our Company technology, scientific, and business workforce. Driven by supremely talented and passionate professionals, CDNA’s mission is to enable our Company’s business divisions to do analytics at high velocity and unparalleled scale.

This position will be part of CDNA’s “architecture and strategy” function and will provide strategic architecture and product portfolio strategy opportunities for talented senior architects with a product & strategy mindset.

The Opportunity

Are you an innovative architect & strategist with an eye for creative data and analytics solutions? Do you feel excited about enabling data and analytics users by providing self-serve product-centric capabilities? Do you believe architecture and strategy are two critical foundational pillars to do analytics at scale? Are you passionate about working with technology professionals and business decision-makers of one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, constantly looking for ways to help patients in need? If so, come join us and help us craft our Company’s data-driven future.

As Director of Data and Analytics Architecture, you will be the primary point of contact for assigned business units for Central Data and Analytics capabilities. You will be approached by various business users & technology teams regularly to understand CDNA’s capabilities, strategy, products, and services and innovation pipeline. You will form a very close relationship with your divisional counterparts and will work as a natural extension of their teams.

As a thought leader in this space, you will not only discuss, show, and socialize existing CDNA capability maps and products but you will also help your assigned business unit select the right products and technologies and implement them in the best possible way. Further, you will work with divisional counterparts and architecture leaders to help the business unit establish their data & analytics architecture, blueprint, and go-forward strategy. You will also actively ask for and collect feedback from business unit members with respect to overall CDNA capabilities, product portfolio, and gaps and will help CDNA establish and sustain product strategy to address this feedback, while taking ownership of CDNA’s commercial business unit-specific analytics strategy.

You will become a single voice for assigned business units from the CDNA standpoint and will work very closely with enterprise architects, other CDNA architects/leaders, as well as divisional architects to bring a level of consistency in terms of how data and analytics strategies, architecture, and blueprints are constructed and how an execution plan is created to turn these artifacts into real solutions.

What you'll do

1. As part of the senior member of data and analytics architecture and strategy function, you will be the single point of contact for Data and Analytics architecture and strategy for your assigned business unit(s).
2. You will become the “voice of the customer” for the assigned business unit for CDNA and the “Voice of CDNA” for the assigned business unit. This means you will be responsible for socialization & evangelism of CDNA capabilities and products to the customer base, articulating current strategy and architecture & best usage patterns.
3. You will demonstrate strong customer focus and will understand the assigned business unit’s business strategy, architectural landscape, data, and analytics strategy, roadmaps, and ensure that divisional strategy and enterprise strategies stay in alignment.
4. You will work very closely with assigned business unit’s architects, divisional data and analytics teams, and analytics business users on a day-to-day basis. Establishing and sustaining a strong partnership with these stakeholders will be a key part of your job.
5. Working hand in hand with our Company’s enterprise architecture team, you will socialize, promote, and govern CDNA’s capabilities, products, services, and overall strategy. Articulation, promotion, and evolution of this strategy will be a core part of your work.
6. Working with various business customers, technology customers, and field workforce, you will also collect product feedback, capability gaps, and identify new white spaces for new capabilities and products.
7. You will then work with other architects, product leaders, and product managers within CDNA to fill in these gaps to address collected feedback.
8. You will also closely work with key technology and service partners to ensure their products, roadmaps, and strategies are positioned to help our Company’s needs.
9. You will work with divisional customers to identify opportunities to implement existing architectural blueprints as well as create new architectural blueprints. You will also help design, articulate, and with the help of the CDNA delivery team, implement architectural solutions for the commercial business unit.
10. You will work closely with stakeholders to ensure that architecture designs meet their requirements.
11. You will monitor trends in the industry and identify “Industry and domain appropriate” trends that can benefit our Company. You will then work with a cross-functional team to perform a POC/POV and will work with the enterprise architecture organization to roll out new trends in the form of a new capability or product.
12. You will also lead the development of data and analytics architecture principles, models, and roadmaps that align with the overall enterprise architecture strategy & assigned business unit’s business goals.
13. You will continuously identify opportunities to improve the architecture & strategy for our Company by collaborating very closely with various key actors.
14. You will play a critical role in supporting the CDNA leadership team in terms of establishing mid-term to long-term product, capability, and architecture strategy.
15. You will also represent CDNA architecture and strategy functions in various internal and external architecture and strategy forums.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or related field

Requirements:

• 8 years of experience in software/data engineering and architecture
• This is a leadership role, and you are expected to work independently within high-level directions and operational framework.
• Strong product and customer centricity with a laser focus on business value proposition and business value realization is a must.
• Strong business relationship management, relationship building, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to see the big picture and imagine modern ideas with an attitude towards iterating towards the end goal. A product mindset is a critical skill to be successful in this role.
• Superior architectural skills with a very strategic mindset. This is partly architecture and partly strategy role and will require critical and strategic thinking.
• Expert knowledge of either AWS cloud ecosystem or Azure Cloud ecosystem from an analytics standpoint
• This is a senior, strategic role and exposure to the entire data supply chain and modern data management, analytics, governance, and security challenges and opportunities is a must.
• Understanding of self-serve product-centric data analytics principles, data mesh, governed data sharing, data fabric, and AI/ML on scale is critical.
• Excellent communication and presentation & negotiation skills. Ability and mindset to see joint success and find the middle ground is a key skill needed.
• Experience in developing enterprise architectures, models, roadmaps, and designs.
• Knowledge of data governance and related technologies (Marketplace, data sharing, MDM, EDM, etc.)
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Ability to work collaboratively with teams across multiple departments.
• Proven track record of delivering projects on time and within budget.
• Demonstrated experience in developing and implementing data architecture strategies.
• Demonstrated understanding of the principles of enterprise architecture.

Preferred Experience:

• 5 years of experience in leading data and analytics architecture initiatives
• 2 years’ experience within the pharmaceutical, life science segment with exposure to pharmaceutical commercial, sales and marketing, manufacturing processes, capabilities, systems, technologies, and data assets

Tech Stack:

Expert-level knowledge around AWS data analytics ecosystem, Databricks, Collibra, Dataiku, Sagemaker, Matillion, Informatica MDM is needed. Understanding of virtualization technologies such as Starburst Trino, Denodo, search-driven analytics such as ThoughtSpot, and visualization capabilities such as QlikView, Tableau, PowerBI. Understanding of AI & Machine learning lifecycle management and AI/ML model lifecycle management, good understanding of Data mesh, data as a product, and data ownership strategies.

Who we are …

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.

What we look for …

Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.