Associate Director, Technical Product Management

Job Description

About DRACOE  

DRACOE (Decommission, Retire and Archive Center of Excellence) delivers secure, compliant, enterprise-scale data retirement and archive services across the company. We enable confident data retention, reduce infrastructure and application support costs, and remove security risk — all while improving data discoverability and usability. 

 

The Opportunity 

We’re building a best-in-class Live Archiving product to help our enterprise safely move petabytes of inactive or infrequently accessed data to cost-effective, searchable, and regulatory-compliant storage tiers — without disrupting user workflows. As Live Archiving Product Manager you will own product strategy and roadmap, influence technical design decisions across cloud and on-prem platforms, and partner with engineering, data governance, security, and vendor partners to drive adoption across the enterprise. 

 

As part of the normal operation of our company Product Owners need to remove data subject to our Records Retention Policy from their application primary data store for performance, cost or capacity reasons. The DRACOE Live Archiving service provides best practices, technology and consulting services to Product Owners to design and implement solutions that enable the data removal to be achieved in a manner that is compliant with our Records Retention Policy, ensuring that the removed data remains secure, locatable and consumable after it has been removed from the application’s primary data store. 

 

Why this role matters 

• Directly reduce multi-million-dollar infrastructure and support costs through smarter data lifecycle management. 

• Improve security, compliance, and data discoverability for critical business processes. 

• Lead a high-impact product at the intersection of product, infrastructure, data governance and vendor strategy. 

What you’ll do (day-to-day) 

• Own the product vision, roadmap, and backlog for Live Archiving across the enterprise. 

• Collaborate with stakeholders (business owners, IT operations, security, legal/compliance, and vendors) to define requirements and success metrics. 

• Translate business and regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions (cloud, hybrid, and on-prem). 

• Prioritize and validate features using user research, analytics, and ROI considerations. 

• Work closely with engineering teams to unblock delivery, clarify scope, and ensure production readiness. 

• Lead pilots and rollouts, and build the adoption plan (training, documentation, and support model). 

• Monitor product health (uptime, performance, cost, adoption) and iterate using data-driven decisions. 

Minimum Requirements- What we’re looking for

• Bachelor's degree required

• 5+ years as a Product Manager / Product Owner delivering cross-functional enterprise products (experience owning roadmaps, backlogs, and delivering with multiple scrum teams). 

• 5+ years hands-on technology experience with large-scale data storage, data migrations, ETL, or big data projects. 

• Demonstrated experience with cloud and hybrid storage strategies (e.g., AWS/Azure/GCP object storage, on-prem NAS/scale-out systems). 

• Strong experience navigating compliance and data governance in regulated industries (pharma or similarly regulated preferred). 

• Proven ability to influence stakeholders, manage vendors, and communicate complex technical topics to non-technical audiences. 

• Excellent organizational, facilitation, and prioritization skills. 

Nice-to-have (preferred) 

• Familiarity with technologies such as: AWS S3 (Glacier), Azure Blob Storage (Archive), Google Cloud Storage, NetApp/Isilon, Ceph/MinIO, Delta Lake/Apache Iceberg, Komprise/Cohesity/Rubrik, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch. 

• Experience with metadata/catalog tools (Collibra, Alation, AWS Glue, Azure Purview). 

• Experience with Kafka, Spark, data lakes, or data pipelines for nearline archiving. 

• Background in SDLC, MDM, design thinking, user research, and usability testing. 

What you’ll learn and the impact you’ll make 

• How to design and operate Live Archiving at multi-petabyte scale in a global enterprise. 

• Deep experience across data governance, regulatory compliance, and vendor ecosystems. 

• The opportunity to make a tangible difference in healthcare through better, more secure access to data. 

Required Skills:

Asset Management, Azure Blob Storage, Benefits Management, Business Processes, Data Governance, Data Store, ElasticSearch, Google Cloud Storage, Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure, Information Technology Operations, IT Operation, IT Project Lifecycle, Management System Development, Metadata Management, Production Readiness, Product Management, Requirements Management, Stakeholder Relationship Management, Strategic Planning, System Designs

Preferred Skills:

Current Employees apply HERE

Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

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:

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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 salary range for this role is

$142,400.00 - $224,100.00

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

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:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

10%

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

1st - Day

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

N/A

Job Posting End Date:

06/23/2026

*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.