Executive Director, AI Delivery Management
Merck · United States, New Jersey, Rahway · hybrid
Job Description
The Executive Director (ED) of AI Delivery Management is a senior member of the organization's (APEX) leadership team reporting directly to the Associate Vice President (AVP) of AI Execution & Process Intelligence Delivery. This leader will set vision and strategy for the engagement/ delivery management function, act as a visible internal catalyst for applied AI, and lead the team of resources to manage the day-to-day execution of APEX’s core business engagements.
This ED will be accountable for APEX’s AI delivery methodologies, engagement lifecycle management, portfolio governance, customer engagement satisfaction, opportunity identification, and engagement learnings harvesting; while ensuring that teams are prioritizing the right work, delivering AI solutions, and accelerating adoption and business impact.
Key Responsibilities:
Strategic Thought Leadership
- Serve as the overall AI engagement execution lead for APEX, translating the AVP’s vision into actionable priorities for product, portfolio, engagement, and innovation efforts.
- Provide executive counsel and represent APEX in cross IT divisional strategy sessions.
- Drive adoption of best practices for ethical, safe, and value-driven AI across product development, portfolio management, and client engagements.
People Leadership & Organization Development
- Lead and mentor day-to-day leaders who manage APEX delivery engagements. Build a delivery execution and management team bench that is aligned, high-performing, and capable of scaling APEX capabilities
- Oversee a department of approximately 30 full-time employees, geographically dispersed across our tech centers.
- Foster a culture of servant leadership, psychological safety, inclusion, and continuous learning across remote and geographically distributed teams.
- Own talent strategy: recruiting, developing, and retaining leaders and high-potential practitioners; manage both employees and contractors as needed.
Product Management Oversight
- Ensure Product Management for AI Solutions and other APEX-owned AI products delivers clear product strategy, roadmaps, market/enterprise fit, and lifecycle management.
- Champion product-led thinking across APEX and provide product management as a service to other divisions, ensuring product practices are consistent, measurable, and outcome-focused.
- Work with product leaders to align product metrics to business value and ensure robust requirements, user-experience design, and go-to-market readiness.
Portfolio Management & Governance
- Lead the demand management function to provide triage, prioritization, valuation, transparency, and strategic alignment across the entire APEX portfolio of work.
- Own prioritization frameworks and investment decision criteria that balance risk, return, strategic alignment, and capacity.
- Ensure transparent portfolio reporting, clear intake processes, and effective stage-gate governance that facilitate timely executive decisions.
Engagement & Client Partnership
- Oversee the engagement team, ensuring the team acts as the “face” of APEX by providing first-line consulting, awareness, and relationship management.
- Drive high-quality stakeholder interactions, ensure client delight, and be accountable for the volume and quality of inbound AI opportunity funneling into APEX.
- Promote consistent messaging, engagement methods, and workshop facilitation standards across the function.
- Apply process intelligence frameworks to identify automation, optimization, and augmentation opportunities
- Develop clear documentation and design blueprints that connect business needs to technical execution
- Ensure alignment between strategic goals, business processes, and AI delivery roadmaps
Delivery & Outcomes Orientation
- Be accountable for aligning engagement strategic priorities to delivery capacity and for the aggregate outcomes delivered by the AI Delivery-led teams.
- Monitor business impact, delivery success/health, and outcome achievement — ensure APEX initiatives translate into measurable improvements to efficiency, growth, or patient outcomes.
Education
- Bachelor’s degree required
- Advanced degree preferred (MBA, MS in AI/ML, Computer Science, or related field).
Required Experience and Skills:
- Exceptional senior leader relationship building and interpersonal skills; able to influence IT Senior Leadership, and Enterprise Leadership, as needed.
- High Executive presence, able to translate strategy into tactical execution.
- Demonstrated thought leadership in AI strategy, product management, portfolio governance, and enterprise transformation.
- Strong facilitation skills: able to design and lead workshops, ideation sessions, and executive briefings that catalyze AI-led change.
- Effective people leader who practices servant leadership, develops managers, and fosters high-performing dispersed teams.
- Expert critical thinking and problem solving; able to frame complex technical and business trade-offs simply and persuasively.
- Proficient in financial valuation, ROI analysis, and risk assessment for technology investments.
- Excellent communicator, capable of translating complex AI concepts into layperson terms and producing clear written artifacts.
- Skilled in decision frameworks and governance design for prioritization across competing opportunities.
- Experience in cross-geography management.
- Minimum 15 years of progressive leadership experience in the software development field in roles such as engineering manager, solution architect, developer lead, test engineer, software developer, or related functions, with a proven trajectory to senior leadership.
- At least 5+ years leading managers or leaders (people leaders of leaders) across multiple functional teams in multiple geographies.
- Demonstrated track record (5+ years recent) of delivering enterprise AI or intelligent automation solutions that produced measurable business impact.
- Experience operating at scale in a large enterprise environment with exposure to product/software lifecycle management and stakeholder engagement.
- Strong familiarity with agile, product, and portfolio management practices and tools.
Success Measures:
- Improved throughput of intake to delivery for AI APEX engagement
- Customer CSAT measures
- High satisfaction and trust scores from divisional partners (stakeholder NPS or equivalent).
- Regular pipeline of prioritized, well-scoped AI opportunities transitioning from Innovation Studios to Product and Delivery.
Location & Travel:
- Ability and willingness to travel up to 25% to meet with divisional partners, sponsor workshops, and lead distributed teams across multiple geographies.
- Hybrid out of Rahway, New Jersey.
Required Skills:
Audit Management, Audit Management, Business Alignment, Business Decisions, Business Process Improvements, Collaborative Leadership, Data Modeling, Delivery Management, Enterprise Leadership, Executive Presence, Governance Management, Information Systems Strategy, Lateral Thinking, Leadership Management, Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Product Delivery, Product Management, Product Ownership, Quality Assurance (QA), Situational Leadership, Stakeholder Management, Stakeholder Relationship Management, Strategic Alignment, Strategic Objectives, Strategic Thinking {+ 2 more}
Preferred Skills:
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