Associate Director, Technical Product Management

Responsibilities:
- Lead end-to-end delivery of FSA initiatives from discovery and requirements through design, build, testing, deployment, and value realization.
- Define and manage delivery plans, milestones, dependencies, resource plans, risks, and critical path activities.
- Coordinate across data, platform, and application squads to ensure timely and high-quality delivery.
- Ensure delivery aligns with AtR strategy, finance calendar, Sarbanes-Oxley controls, and enterprise architecture standards.
- Drive release planning and execution (cutover, deployment readiness, hypercare, and post-release stabilization).
- Coordinate dry runs, regression testing, and readiness activities for monthly, quarterly, and year-end financial close cycles.
- Ensure clear deployment communications, issue triage, and rollback/contingency planning.
- Oversee day-to-day operational readiness and support for the FSA (stability, performance, capacity, incident management).
- Establish and monitor SLAs/SLOs for availability, response time, and service quality.
- Lead production triage, root-cause analysis, and remediation planning with technical teams.
- Coordinate maintenance windows, change management, and disaster recovery/business continuity planning.
- Translate business priorities into delivery plans; communicate status, risks, and dependencies.
- Ensure adherence to data privacy, security, and regulatory requirements with governance/compliance teams.
- Coordinate internal and vendor resources for delivery and support.
- Coach/mentor teams; foster accountability, continuous improvement, automation, and measurable outcomes.
- Manage vendor performance and track delivery/operational KPIs (milestones, defects, MTTR, availability, backlog throughput).
- Report progress, identify corrective actions, and drive optimization initiatives.
- Support business case development and communicate delivered value.

Education:
- Minimum: BA/BS in Information Systems, Computer Science, Business, Finance, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
- Preferred: Master’s degree/MBA (or equivalent).

Required Qualifications:
- Proven experience in Program/Project/Delivery Management and Project Support.
- Strong stakeholder relationship, risk management, planning, and measurement analysis skills.
- Ability to leverage technical knowledge in a digital environment.
- Experience working with technical SMEs; technical job families such as Information Architecture and Software Engineering.
- Track record leading cross-functional initiatives with measurable outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience supporting delivery for financial systems or accounting/reporting data platforms.
- Deep understanding of financial accounting/management reporting/analytics and financial data consumers.
- Familiarity with monthly/quarterly/year-end close processes and controls.
- Cross-functional leadership across product/value leads, technical leads, designers, analysts, user groups, business stakeholders, and external partners.
- Ability to manage competing priorities/dependencies/risks in complex global environments.
- Technical platform experience (SAP HANA Sidecar, SAP SLT Replication, HANA Table Functions/Stored Procedures/Studio, HANA-native modeling, Custom ETL, Analytic Privileges/HANA security roles, Trino, Autosys, Airflow, DIFW/S3).
- 11+ years in IT and/or project/delivery management.

Application:
- Apply at https://jobs.merck.com/us/en (or Workday Jobs Hub for current employees).