Director - Preclinical Development, Digital Insights (hybrid)

Merck Merck · Pharma · NJ

Seeking a Director of Digital Insights to lead a multidisciplinary team in shaping and executing high-impact digital insights capabilities that accelerate pharmaceutical development. The role involves driving strategy, delivery, and adoption of advanced data, analytics, and AI-enabled solutions, combining scientific domain fluency, digital strategy, and people leadership.

What you'd actually do

  1. Serve as a team leader who leads and mentors team members specializing in data engineering, data science, software development, and predictive sciences. Inspire effective employee development.
  2. Contribute to the collaborative design, implementation, and optimization of modern, automated, and contextualized data pipelines that enable seamless data flow, integration, and accessibility across scientific and operational domains. Guide the creation of advanced data visualization platforms and dashboards to support decision-making, enhance data-driven insights, and democratize access to analytics for scientists and business partners. Champion the development and deployment of in silico modeling.
  3. Partner with operational subject matter experts to develop and implement change management strategies.
  4. Provide clear elucidation of the business value being realized through digital efforts. Drive establishment and measurement of project metrics aligned with program goals.

Skills

Required

  • Demonstrated ability to translate complex scientific or business problems into digital solutions
  • Strong people leadership, influencing, and change‑management skills
  • Excellent communication skills, demonstrated creativity, and effective interpersonal skills
  • Data Analysis
  • Executive Presence
  • Financial Acumen
  • Financial Research
  • Innovation
  • Mentoring Staff
  • People Leadership
  • Product Development
  • Regulatory CMC
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Strategic Planning

Nice to have

  • Experience in the Chemistry, Manufacturing and Control (CMC) space covering drug substance processes, drug product processes and analytical methods
  • Experience with the development and implementation of data analysis and modeling (including machine learning) workflows or solutions
  • Experience with one or more drug modalities being developed internally such as small molecule, biologics, vaccines, peptides, drug conjugates
  • Familiar with programming in R and/or Python and Posit/RStudio/Jupyter
  • Experience with data visualization tools (Shiny, Streamlit, Spotfire, Dash, PowerBI, or Tableau)
  • Exceptional employee development skills gained through prior people management or mentorship roles.
  • Ability to work in a team environment with cross-functional interactions
  • Motivated to learn new skills, willingness to take on new challenges, and scientific curiosity.
  • Proven track record of peer-reviewed publications and external research presentations

What the JD emphasized

  • advanced data
  • analytics
  • AI-enabled solutions
  • digital insights capabilities
  • predictive sciences
  • data engineering
  • data science
  • software development
  • data pipelines
  • data visualization platforms
  • in silico modeling
  • machine learning

Other signals

  • AI-enabled solutions
  • advanced data
  • analytics
  • predictive sciences
  • digital insights capabilities