Senior Director, Software Engineering

Job Description

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced, strategic leader to evolve the ServiceNow portfolio of products, associated data domains, data products, and services offered to IT, Security, and our Company's Business Divisions. The role will combine ownership of enterprise data and foundational platform capabilities with direct partnerships across Manufacturing, Research & Labs, and other business functions. The leader will stay up to date on key automation trends in the life sciences sector that center on ServiceNow; translate business priorities into a multi-year ServiceNow product roadmap; improve the quality and governance of critical enterprise data; and ensure the platform is ready to support AI-enabled workflows and future agentic capabilities.

This leader will also work closely with other leaders in the U.S. and international data products, services, and solutions organization to ensure that the organization’s needs are addressed appropriately and efficiently.

This is a highly strategic, business-facing leadership role. The successful candidate will be expected to operate beyond traditional platform delivery—shaping product strategy, challenging existing ways of working, aligning senior stakeholders, and driving measurable business outcomes.

This is a hybrid role ( 3 days/ week in office) based in Rahway, NJ.

Position Responsibilities

Role Overview: Responsible for framing the strategic vision and enabling the efficient and effective delivery of ServiceNow platform services across business divisions and technology organizations, while ensuring that ServiceNow data is optimized, governed, engineered for scale, and leveraged for immediate analytical, business, and GenAI use cases.

Manufacturing & Business Partnership

• Serve as a senior strategic partner to our Company's Manufacturing Division, our Company's Research & Labs, Animal Health and other business stakeholders.
• Translate business problems into prioritized ServiceNow products and capabilities, develop roadmaps, and drive execution of prioritized initiatives.
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with senior business leaders regarding ServiceNow capabilities.
• Anticipate emerging business needs and proactively shape solutions with stakeholders.

AI-Ready Enterprise Data & Platform Strategy

• Own the strategy, roadmap, and outcomes for ServiceNow data management capabilities, including the CMDB and related foundational data domains.
• Establish ServiceNow as a trusted enterprise data and workflow platform by improving data quality, ownership, governance, completeness, accuracy and usability.
• Define the future-state data model and operating approach for foundational data that enables IT, OT, asset management, enterprise architecture, security, risk and business workflows.
• Lead the evolution of the CMDB toward a more federated, automated and AI-ready data foundation, including opportunities to apply automation and agentic capabilities.
• Create and enforce enterprise data quality standards, ownership models, controls and remediation processes for critical ServiceNow data.
• Prepare the ServiceNow data estate for AI use cases by improving semantic consistency, lineage, context, relationships and trust in enterprise data.
• Partner with enterprise AI, governance, security and architecture leaders to ensure ServiceNow data and workflows can safely support AI-enabled and agentic experiences.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture, Data, Security, Infrastructure and business leaders to establish common definitions, standards and governance for enterprise data.

Product Management & ServiceNow Roadmap

• Establish a product-oriented operating model across the portfolio, with clear product vision, outcomes, roadmaps, investment priorities, adoption measures and lifecycle management.
• Continuously evaluate the ServiceNow product portfolio and market direction to determine what capabilities are appropriate for research laboratories, manufacturing plants, quality and compliance, security, risk and other regulated environments.
• Partner closely with ServiceNow and strategic technology partners to influence product roadmaps, validate emerging capabilities, and ensure that our Company needs are represented.
• Lead prioritization of demand, investment and capacity across a broad portfolio, balancing strategic transformation with sustainment and operational needs.

Team Leadership & Innovation

• Lead a significant global organization spanning U.S. business-facing leadership and distributed engineering, development, testing and operations capabilities.
• Build a strong leadership bench, including deputies and succession plans, to eliminate single points of failure and create scalable leadership capacity.
• Establish the right balance between supplier-dependent delivery and internal ownership of sustainment and transformation capabilities.
• Create a culture centered on customer service, business partnership, accountability, speed to value, and completing work across organizational boundaries.

Behavioral Competencies Required

Cross-Functional Leadership & Matrix Management:

• Collaborative alignment: Proven track record of leading large, high-performing, cross-functional teams across IT, Manufacturing, Research & Labs, and Enterprise Data functions.
• Enterprise representation: Confidently represent the data organization in Legal, Privacy, and Global Ethics forums to drive risk mitigation strategies.

Accountability & Delivery Excellence:

• Autonomous execution: Operates independently with a strong sense of ownership over timelines, product quality, and delivery excellence.
• Financial stewardship: Highly accountable for managing budgets, driving operational efficiencies, and optimizing compute/cloud costs at scale.

AI-Native Mindset & Continuous Improvement:

• Challenges the status quo: Consistently looks for ways to modernize legacy processes and embed AI-assisted workflows into standard operations.
• Adaptable leadership: Navigates changing business priorities while maintaining stability and reliability for core data products.

Strategic Vision with Operational Focus:

• Anticipates gaps: Strategically understands our Manufacturing division and our Research & Development division business portfolio and proactively identifies data gaps or opportunities.
• Scalable thinking: Balances immediate business needs with the necessity of building long-term, scalable, and highly reliable architectural solutions.

Functional Competencies Required:

Core Healthcare Data Domain Expertise:

• Domain knowledge in pharma research, compliance, manufacturing processes & data domains.
• Data synthesis: Proven ability to work with enterprise/central data functions to synthesize a wide array of structured and unstructured pharma datasets.

Data Platform & Pipeline Engineering:

• Modern cloud architecture: Proven success in building, scaling, and maintaining modern data platforms and data pipelines (e.g., ServiceNow, AWS, Databricks).
• Enterprise-scale operations: Hands-on experience managing data operations, SLAs, and data reliability at a massive, enterprise scale.

Agile Data Product Management:

• End-to-end lifecycle: Deep experience directing the full product lifecycle for data products, from vision and requirements to release and adoption.
• Modern delivery frameworks: Familiarity with agile product development methodologies and API orchestration for seamless data consumption.
• Data Governance, Privacy & Security:
• Compliance by design: Strong understanding of data privacy requirements (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR, GXP, GMP) and how to engineer compliance directly into data pipelines and products.

Required Minimum Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in analytics, data science, computational sciences, science, or computer science.
• Master’s degree preferred in analytics, data science, computational sciences, science, or computer science.
• 13+ years of progressive technology and/or digital leadership experience in consulting, pharmaceuticals, or life sciences, with significant experience leading enterprise platforms, products, or data capabilities.
• Strong experience with ServiceNow or a comparable enterprise workflow/platform ecosystem, including CMDB, ITOM, Asset Management, Enterprise Architecture and/or related data capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with senior business executives, understand business strategy, and translate business needs into technology and product roadmaps.
• Excellent communication, influencing, negotiation and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to challenge conventional thinking constructively.

Required Skills

ServiceNow, ITOM, Configuration Management, Network Discovery, Operational Technology (OT) Management, CMDB, IT Service Management, Enterprise Service Management (ESM), IT Operations, Customer Engagement, Database Administration, Data Governance, Data Quality, Delivery Excellence, Design Applications, Functional Leadership, Information Management, Operational Excellence, Prioritization, Risk Mitigation Strategies, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Strategic Leadership, System Designs

Required Skills:

Agile Leadership, Agile Leadership, Business Decisions, Business Needs, Cloud Architectures, Cloud Computing, Data as a Service, Data Engineering, Data Security, Data Services, Data Visualization, Delivery Management, Design Applications, Operating Models, Pipeline Development, Platform Design, Product Delivery, Product Roadmap, Risk Avoidance, Service Delivery Models, Software Configurations, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, Strategic Leadership {+ 4 more}

Preferred Skills:

Strategic Vision

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities. Please click here if you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process.

As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities. For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:

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We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another’s thinking and approach problems collectively.

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The salary range for this role is

$190,800.00 - $300,300.00

This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, government requirements, and business or organizational needs.

The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits. Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. More information about benefits is available at .

You can apply for this role through (or via the Workday Jobs Hub if you are a current employee). The application deadline for this position is stated on this posting.

San Francisco Residents Only: We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

10%

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

1st - Day

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

N/A

Job Posting End Date:

09/10/2026

*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.