Executive Director - Global Scientific Marketing Affairs, Companion Animal

Job Description

The Companion Animal (CA) Business unit leads strategy development and execution across markets throughout the world. It drives global marketing strategies and activities to drive successful key CA launches and maximizes the value of in-line products. Our Company's Animal Health (AH) division has a very robust pipeline of new products and initiatives providing customer benefits and driving business growth.  Within the AH Companion Animal portfolio, Bravecto, Caninsulin, Nobivac, the Otic Portfolio, and Home Again are leaders within their respective categories.

The Executive Director is accountable to lead scientific and medical strategies across the company’s CA portfolio and within therapeutic categories, understand customer and competitive dynamics, influence medical policy, identify growth opportunities, define competitive advantages, and set a work standard of excellence by providing a best-in-class scientific/professional image within the veterinary industry. You will manage a team responsible for all aspects of medical activities including publications, conferences, and medical education planning, CME, as well as thought leader and key opinion leader management. The veterinary scientific marketing team provides actionable medical insights to marketing franchises and commercial teams to drive business performance. Providing excellence in scientific support activities to assist customers and capture the most value in alignment with division’s strategic initiatives is essential.

This is a new position requiring an experienced individual with vision, strong market, and commercial understanding, and outstanding leadership and influencing skills. You will set global technical affairs direction for all existing and future companion animal therapeutic, biologic, technology solutions, and services. 

The Executive Director – Global Scientific Marketing Affairs, Companion Animal, reports directly to the Associate Vice President of the Companion Animal Business Unit and will lead a core team of technical services directors with a scope of influence extending globally, and who influence extended teams consisting of 10 to 100 commercial and technical services team members across all geographies. As a core member of the Global Companion Animal Leadership Team, you will collaborate closely with global leadership setting strategic direction and will interact and influence at all levels of the company (including Executive Leadership) to ensure optimized and successful CA marketing strategy, competitive differentiation, and creating cross-portfolio value. The position will be based in the US.

Key Responsibilities
Strategic Medical Leadership:
•    Develop and implement a global Medical Affairs strategy across the lifecycle of our Company's Animal Health products from launch to maturity. 
•    Lead customer-centric thinking and craft scientific programs to build our company’s leadership position and advocacy among thought leaders, KOLs, veterinary academia, and veterinarians.
•    Support business expansion and strategic partnerships through medical leadership, including input into due diligence, in-licensing opportunities, and evaluation of external assets and commercial partners. 
•    Represent the medical voice of the company, and champion medical thought leadership to inspire the broader marketing organization

Team Leadership & Functional Growth:
•    Lead and develop a growing Medical Affairs team supporting therapeutic franchises and matrix relationships with Medical Directors in regions and key markets. 
•    Oversee and expand the Scientific Communications, Publications, Congresses as part of long-term medical capability development. 
•    Create a culture of continuous learning, accountability, and veterinary excellence. 

Scientific Exchange and Veterinary Education:
•    Represent the medical voice of the company, and champion medical thought leadership to inspire the broader marketing organization.
•    Collaborate and partner with veterinary medical organizations, veterinary schools, policy makers, researchers, and thought leaders to gain insights.
•    Maintain consistent communications throughout the companion animal veterinary medical affairs teams to ensure effective world-wide coordination.
•    Lead and oversee the development and execution of data generation plans, including Phase IV studies, real-world data, and investigator-initiated studies. 
•    Collaborate with Clinical Development to design post-marketing studies and led strategies to better understand therapeutic response and therapy differentiation. 
•    Drive strategic planning and delivery of strategically aligned scientific data to global congresses, publications, preceptorships. 
•    Develop and oversee CME activities that advance disease and therapy awareness and support optimal pet care. 
•    Enable advisory boards and peer-to-peer programs that expand awareness of disease management innovations and treatment value. 
•    Champion new solutions to enhance pet management, including integration of wearable technologies, remote monitoring, and digital monitors. 
•    Collaborate across functions to explore predictive markers and data-driven tools to improve treatment outcomes. 
•    Pilot novel technologies in partnership with academic institutions and innovation hubs to stay ahead of clinical practice evolution. 

Compliance, Governance, and Risk Management:
•    Ensure business practices and policy in compliance with regulatory and legal requirements.
•    Ensure all activities, materials and external communications follow internal SOPs and industry standards for ethical engagement. 

Budgeting & Financial Management:
•    Ensure optimal allocation of resources across global medical activities to align with corporate goals and maximize scientific and patient impact. 
•    Employ excellent fiscal management acumen while developing and managing department-wide operating expense forecasts and budgets.

Education:
•    DVM, VMD, BVM&S, or equivalent: Advanced scientific, policy, business degree preferred. 

Required:
•    Strong, Veterinary medical & scientific business experience is highly preferred with a minimum of 15 years of broad work experience in practice, leadership, academic, and industry related activities.
•    People management experience mandatory
•    Proven history of inspirational and transformational leadership, building and leading high-performing teams from a multicultural, international environment, diverse countries, and business backgrounds in a matrix organization.
•    Demonstrated ability in communication, conflict resolution, judgment and managing complexity and ambiguity.
•    Proven experience of creating and executing global successful veterinary customer strategies with measured results with set of clear metrics.

Required Competencies & Skills:
•    High scientific rigor, excellent communication, and the drive to challenge convention and deliver sustainable value for veterinarians, pet owners, and pet patients. 
•    Demonstrated management of multimillion-dollar budgets supporting across multiple initiatives.
•    Ability to challenge and drive the organization towards the success of key veterinary strategies.
•    Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills
•    A great motivator, coach, and collaborator with the ability to develop high-quality working relationships both internally and externally.
•    Able to travel up to 35% of time including Europe, Asia, and South America.
 

Required Skills:

Budget Management, Business Compliance, Business Expansion, Conflict Resolution, Cross-Cultural Awareness, Customer-Focused, Financial Budgeting, Interpersonal Relationships, Key Opinion Leader Management, Marketing Communications (MarCom), Market Research, Medical Affairs, Pricing Strategies, Product Management, Professional Networking, Public Finance Management, Segmentation Strategy, Strategic Decisions, Transformational Leadership, Veterinary Medicine

Preferred Skills:

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The salary range for this role is

$231,900.00 - $365,000.00

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.

San Francisco Residents Only: We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

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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:

Domestic

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

25%

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

N/A

Job Posting End Date:

07/1/2026

*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.