Job Description

The Opportunity

• Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare.
• Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products.
• Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology Centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of our company’s IT operating model, Tech Centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy.

A focused group of leaders in each Tech Center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers.

As an Associate Director, you will provide strategic direction and business-facing leadership for customer master data stewardship. You will define and advance stewardship operating models, partner with business and technology leaders, and ensure that customer data governance is executed effectively across systems and regions.

You will also lead and develop a team of stewardship professionals while remaining actively engaged in the operational and strategic aspects of customer master data management. This is not solely a people management role; it requires deep subject matter expertise, strong business partnership, and the ability to influence stewardship practices, data quality outcomes, and automation priorities across the enterprise.

1. Stewardship Strategy and Operating Model

• Define and drive the customer master data stewardship strategy in alignment with enterprise data governance objectives and business priorities.
• Establish and evolve the stewardship operating model, including roles, responsibilities, processes, controls, and escalation paths.
• Ensure stewardship practices support a trusted customer golden record and enable harmonization, survivorship, and consistency across domains.
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to assess current-state challenges and shape future-state stewardship capabilities.
• Translate business needs into scalable stewardship processes, controls, and service expectations.

2. Governance, Standards, and Data Quality Leadership

• Oversee the enforcement of master data standards, hierarchies, code sets, survivorship rules, and data quality expectations for customer data.
• Monitor stewardship effectiveness through data quality metrics, issue trends, SLA performance, and operational dashboards.
• Lead root cause analysis and remediation initiatives for recurring customer data issues, duplicates, conflicts, and process gaps.
• Ensure appropriate governance for sensitive customer master data, including PII and PHI, in partnership with the MDM lead and compliance stakeholders.
• Drive continuous improvement in data quality management and stewardship controls.

3. Business Partnership and Stakeholder Engagement

• Serve as a senior business-facing leader for customer master data stewardship across commercial and enterprise functions.
• Build trusted relationships with business leaders, data owners, technology partners, and governance teams to align stewardship priorities and resolve issues.
• Influence decision-making on customer data policy, process design, and operational trade-offs.
• Represent stewardship in enterprise forums, governance councils, and transformation initiatives.
• Communicate risks, progress, and recommendations in a clear, concise, and executive-ready manner.
• Lead delivery teams and review technical designs and code (if required)
• Engage senior stakeholders to align data standards, priorities, and roadmap
• Provide thought leadership on MDM best practices

4. Operational Leadership and Service Management

• Oversee day-to-day stewardship operations for customer master data, including match/merge, issue triage, lifecycle management, and exception handling.
• Ensure effective management of customer data requests, system impacts, and downstream dependencies.
• Monitor and maintain Service Level Agreements (SLAs), operational commitments, and escalation management.
• Support system upgrades, release readiness, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for MDM changes and enhancements.
• Ensure operational discipline through documented procedures, controls, and performance review mechanisms.

5. Automation, AI Enablement, and Innovation

• Champion automation and agentic AI initiatives to reduce manual effort and improve stewardship scalability and responsiveness.
• Identify opportunities to automate validation, routing, issue classification, reporting, and exception management activities.
• Partner with technology teams to evaluate and implement intelligent workflows and decision-support capabilities.
• Promote a culture of innovation within stewardship operations, balancing control with efficiency and scalability.
• Support adoption of tools and processes that enhance business value and reduce operational friction.

6. Team Leadership and Talent Development

• Lead, coach, and develop stewardship team members to build functional expertise, accountability, and high performance.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and customer-focused team culture.
• Set clear expectations, provide feedback, and support professional growth and succession planning.
• Ensure effective workload management, role clarity, and team alignment to business priorities.
• While people management is a key part of the role, the position remains deeply engaged in strategic stewardship, stakeholder partnership, and operational execution.

Who You Are

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 14+ years of experience in data stewardship, master data management, data governance, or related disciplines.
• Proven experience working with Commercial Pharma domains (HCP/HCO, affiliations, sales, CRM) and leading customer master data stewardship in a complex, regulated enterprise environment.
• Strong hands-on experience with Informatica MDM
• Strong SQL skills are required.
• Proven experience driving stewardship strategy, governance execution, and data quality improvements.
• Experience partnering with business leaders and technology teams in a matrixed organization.
• Experience with merge/unmerge processes, release management, and User Acceptance Testing.
• Familiarity with CRM platforms such as Veeva CRM or comparable systems.
• Strong understanding of SOP compliance, operational controls, and data privacy requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams while remaining hands-on in strategic and operational stewardship work.
• Strong executive communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong experience for automation, workflow optimization, or AI-enabled operational transformation is preferred.

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 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.

#HYDIT2025

Required Skills:

Data Management, Data Modeling, Quality Management

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

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:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements:

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Valid Driving License:

Hazardous Material(s):

Job Posting End Date:

06/29/2026

*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.