Executive Director, AI Delivery Management

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• Bachelor’s degree required
• Advanced degree preferred (MBA, MS in AI/ML, Computer Science, or related field).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities. Please click here if you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process.

As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.  As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.  For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:

EEOC Know Your Rights

EEOC GINA Supplement​

We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another’s thinking and approach problems collectively.

Learn more about your rights, including under California, Colorado and other US State Acts

The primary location for this posting is:

Where required by law, the compensation range for this role is provided below.

The salary range for the primary location of this role is:

This range reflects the Company's reasonable expectation of the base salary applicable to this role at the time of 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.