Product Manager/Associate Director, Disease Biology and PharmTox Product Line – Multimodal Integration and Biomarker Discovery

Job Description

Location: Boston/Cambridge ,NJ, PA

Job Description:

The Research and Development Sciences (RaDS) value team in our Company's R&D IT brings together product management, engineering, and data science expertise. We enable data, technology, and services that accelerate our scientists’ ability to discover and develop innovative medicines that change the course of human health. In the RaDS value team, the Product organization is responsible for implementing capabilities and associated services to advance the drug discovery and development pipeline. Our IT team operates as a business partner, proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver the services and solutions that help everyone to be more productive and enable innovation.

We are seeking a Product Manager to join the RaDS Digital Solutions organization, reporting to the Lead of the Disease Biology & PharmTox Product Line. The successful candidate will partner closely with scientific stakeholders, product managers, engineers, data scientists, and cross-functional IT teams to define and deliver high-impact digital solutions that accelerate preclinical research and drug discovery.

This role will drive product strategy, roadmap development, and execution across a portfolio of platforms that support experimental modalities, including high-content imaging, proteomics, genomics, spatial omics, phenotypic screening, and digital pathology. The product ecosystem is focused on enabling researchers to generate deeper biological insights, evaluate therapeutic candidates more effectively, and leverage scalable FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data and AI-ready capabilities across imaging, pathology, and multi-omics workflows.

By delivering integrated digital solutions and scientific workflows, this team helps reduce time-to-insight, advance predictive and data-driven approaches to research, and streamline discovery and preclinical processes. These capabilities play a critical role in enabling faster, more informed decision-making and ultimately supporting the development of safer and more effective medicines.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Set, own, and communicate the product vision, strategy, and outcome-based roadmap for digital capabilities supporting Disease Biology & PharmTox priorities, in partnership with R&D scientists, Business Technology Partners, and Product line leadership

• Define and prioritize the roadmap for multi-modal profiling capabilities that span early disease biology investigations and preclinical research, balancing scientific impact, user needs, strategic priorities, technical feasibility, risk, and investment requirements.

• Manage product investments and provide input into business cases, including expected value, delivery options, resource requirements, risks, dependencies, and total cost of ownership.

• Develop a cohesive strategy to manage an orthogonal suite of products and applications, maximizing impact while reducing costs and redundancy. Diligently manage total cost of ownership.

• Align digital capabilities and priorities across stakeholder groups and partners, including scientists, data scientists, lab operations, technology teams, and business leaders, to drive shared outcomes and reduce fragmented or duplicative solutions.

• Collaborate with platform product lines across Lab Operations and Data & Analytics to support multi-omics, pre-clinical and imaging workflows end to end, from data acquisition and ingestion through storage, processing, analysis, visualization, reporting, and reuse.

• Deeply understand user needs (scientists, data scientists, lab operations) through interviews, shadowing, and usage analytics

• Map processes and information architecture to identify pain points and automation opportunities

• Translate scientific and business needs into clear problem statements, product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, success measures, and Product Requirements Documents.

• Drive solution discovery and rapid prototyping with cross-functional teams to evaluate value, usability, feasibility, and business viability

• Prioritize features and trade-offs using impact, effort, and risk frameworks; manage backlog and release planning

• Manage a portfolio of scientific applications and lead squads to build user-friendly scientific data and technology products; handle risk assessment and vendor engagement as needed

• Evaluate internal and external tools; Manage vendor relationships to influence roadmaps and integrate with internal systems and the data lake

• Partner with Product Tech leads/Engineering leads to ensure seamless integration across the ecosystem and upstream/downstream systems

• Apply industry standards and ontologies to develop FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) applications, advancing in silico models and AI/ML approaches for drug discovery

• Create and maintain documentation including SDLC deliverables (GxP and non-GxP), guidelines, SOPs, training materials, and user communications

• Support regulatory audits and inspections, as needed, by collaborating with stakeholders and Quality to provide documentation and respond to inquiries

• Drive adoption data-driven using metrics (synthesized from research, observations, and usage) and user feedback; analyze engagement, create reports/visualizations, and run user groups to inform continuous improvement

• Promote available capabilities to stakeholders, fostering collaboration and integration across teams to avoid silos

• Monitor the competitive landscape, standards, and emerging technologies in scientific software and data platforms

• Coach teams to adopt a customer-centered product mindset; proactively remove roadblocks and escalate issues to maintain momentum

Skill sets:

• 5+ years of experience in scientific software development, pharmaceutical sciences, target discovery, or scientific data management

• Strong understanding of early target discovery and preclinical development domain and processes

• Proven experience leading multidisciplinary squads to launch and manage software products; translate business needs into user stories and product requirements

• Experience with scientific workflows (COTS, in-house, open source); ability to assess, integrate, and scale them

• Solid grasp of SDLC and Agile practices; comfortable operating in GxP-regulated environments

• Exceptional communicator who bridges science, engineering, and business; customer-centric and effective in a matrixed organization

• Proficient with product and UX tooling (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Mural, Figma, Balsamiq); capable of producing clear documentation and visuals

• Working knowledge of data models, ontologies, and information architecture in drug discovery

• Proven ability to work independently and asynchronously across time zones, with excellent cross-cultural and organizational communication skills

• Highly organized, with strong project and stakeholder management capabilities

• Demonstrated ability to operate at both strategic and execution levels, balancing long-term product vision with near-term delivery

Education Minimum Requirement:

• M.A./M.S. with 3+ years, or B.A./B.S. with 5+ years of experience in a scientific or technical discipline such as biology, pharmaceutical sciences, bioinformatics, computer science, biostatistics, biomedical engineering, or chemistry

Preferred Experience and Skills:

• Experience as a scientist, Informatics Analyst, Imaging analyst or IT analyst in a drug discovery or development environment, specifically pre-clinical development area

• Experience using AI-powered product tools (e.g., for backlog refinement, requirements generation, user insights synthesis, prototyping)

• Familiarity with integrating AI-enabled tools into scientific workflows (e.g., data annotation, AI driven data entry)

• Ability to define and measure value for AI-driven features (e.g., accuracy, explainability, user trust, adoption)

• Experience supervising and mentoring team members

• Proficiency with data analytics/mining tools (e.g., R, Python)

• Familiarity with structured, relational databases and data integration.

• Skill in data visualization and dashboards with the ability to craft compelling data narratives (e.g. PowerBI)

• Experience working in Agile development environments

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

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The salary range for this role is

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 https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.

You can apply for this role through https://jobs.merck.com/us/en (or via the Workday Jobs Hub if you are a current employee). The application deadline for this position is stated on this posting.

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