Director, R&D Digital Capabilities

Join the team behind iconic brands like Huggies®, Kleenex®, Cottonelle®, Scott®, Kotex®, Poise®, Depend®, and Kimberly-Clark Professional®  At Kimberly-Clark, it’s all here for you—innovation, growth, and the chance to make a real impact. 

You were made to create Better Care for a Better World: exploring uncharted questions, engineering innovative solutions, advancing scientific understanding, and constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. You want to be part of a performance culture dedicated to solving real-world problems with purpose and precision. You want to work in an environment that promotes sustainability, inclusion, wellbeing, and career development. In this role, you’ll help us shape the future and improve lives for billions of people around the world.

It starts with YOU.

In one of our R&D Digital roles, you’ll focus on winning with consumers and the market, while putting safety, mutual respect, and human dignity at the center. Job responsibilities include:

• Own the R&D digital program roadmap, translating digital transformation priorities into milestones, workplans, dependencies, and delivery timelines.
• Define target operating models, platforms, data products, and patterns for R&D digital capabilities.
• Manage end-to-end execution of priority digital programs, ensuring clear ownership, decision points, risks, issues, costs, and implementation plans.
• Lead executive communication, decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and trade-off management across R&D, QRC, IT, and other partners.
• Establish program intake and prioritization discipline, ensuring digital requests are routed through a strategy-led process rather than one-off solutions.
• Coordinate funding, resourcing, and value cases for digital initiatives, escalating trade-offs and blockers to the Vice President, R&D Digital and AI Transformation.
• Innovate how we innovate to keep pace with consumers, competitors, and technology; embed digital at the core of how innovation is developed and scaled.
• Connect digital programs with R&D, IT, commercial, and enabling functions, with clear build/run responsibilities and cross-functional handoffs.
• Focus program support on the highest-priority initiatives, ensuring scarce digital delivery capacity is directed to the largest impact areas and properly sequenced.
• Build digital capability in partnership with the R&D Modeling and Simulation leader and matrix leaders in Packaging, QRC, Medical Affairs, and other teams.
• Track value realization and adoption, including cycle-time reduction, productivity benefits, user engagement, CSAT, and delivery against agreed baselines.
• Lead and develop leaders, senior individual contributors, and organizational talent, and provide matrix leadership to digital partners across R&D, QRC, IT, and enabling functions.
• Ensure all work complies with Corporate Safety, Regulatory and Quality requirements as well as our Company Code of Conduct.

To succeed in this role, you will need the following qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM, computer science/information systems, or business-related field from an accredited college/university.
• 10+ years of experience in R&D, digital, or technology environments, including leading complex change and digital transformation programs.
• Proven leader of leaders with a track record of developing talent and leading through matrix structures and influence.
• Strategy-to-execution leadership, with strong ability to translate digital strategy into executable roadmaps, sequenced investments, governance, and measurable value cases.
• Disciplined product ownership, portfolio prioritization, and program governance mindset; ability to manage risks, dependencies, funding, and executive-level decisions and alignment.
• Systems thinking and technology judgment to connect opportunities into an integrated plan.
• Digital and technology fluency; understands AI, data, platforms, and emerging technology.
• Strong cross-functional influence across R&D, QRC, IT, supply chain, and commercial.
• Strong executive-level verbal and written communication skills.
• Approximately 10-25% travel.

• Experience in R&D and/or regulated environments such as quality, regulatory, medical affairs, or sustainability.
• Experience defining target operating models, platforms, data products, and reusable patterns with clear build/run ownership between Business and IT teams.
• Track record of delivering measurable value from digital and AI programs, including improvements in cycle time, productivity, adoption, and user experience against baseline.
• Experience leading agile and product-based delivery with globally distributed teams.