Associate Director, Digital Engagement Operations (Hybrid)

Job Description

Job Description:

The Associate Director, Digital Engagement Operations is responsible for the day-to-day operational execution, delivery management, and cross-functional orchestration of assigned US Market web properties. This role operationalizes established digital engagement strategies, brand priorities, content standards, and channel governance frameworks into AI discoverable, compliant website experiences.

The Associate Director acts as an essential operational bridge among marketing teams, information technology, user experience/design, content publishing, analytics, legal, regulatory, medical review partners, accessibility discoverability specialists, and external agency teams. Within established strategic parameters, the Associate Director stewards assigned channel roadmaps, backlogs, and release sequencing, proactively surfacing risks and providing evidence-based recommendations.

Key Responsibilities:

Digital Engagement Operations and Delivery:

• Manage daily website operations and releases for assigned Healthcare professional, consumer, and business web properties.
• Turn approved brand strategies, business priorities, and digital guidelines into delivery requirements, release schedules, and execution plans.
• Maintain assigned channel backlogs and roadmaps, ensuring launch readiness, production quality, ongoing maintenance, and defect resolution.
• Weigh trade-offs among speed to market, technical stability, compliance, and user experience; recommend a path and execute approved decisions.

Capacity, Prioritization, and Operational Planning:

• Maintain clear status reports, dashboards, milestone tracking, and dependency logs.
• Proactively escalate resource bottlenecks, conflicting priorities, technical hurdles, policy questions, and portfolio trade-offs.
• Continuously improve workflows to increase delivery speed, quality, and predictability.

Governance, Standards, and Compliance Facilitation

• Facilitate adherence to metadata, taxonomy, structured content, accessibility, search and AI discoverability, and privacy standards.
• Support adherence to channel governance, brand guidelines, medical/legal/regulatory requirements, and quality benchmarks throughout production.

Cross-Functional Business Integration:

Partner with marketing strategy, brand, commercial operations, and customer engagement teams to turn commercial objectives into web execution plans.

Serve as the day-to-day operational point of contact across commercial, creative/UX, digital publishing, development, and review teams.

Lead alignment meetings, identify dependencies, clear execution roadblocks, and prepare escalation briefs when consensus cannot be reached.

Customer Experience and Performance Monitoring:

• Coordinate the implementation of approved website enhancements, functional updates, content clarity revisions, and search/discoverability improvements.
• Support the execution of pilot initiatives and testing plans, gather and synthesize operational data, and report findings to inform future scaling decisions.

Team Collaboration and Operational Discipline:

• Foster operational discipline, clear communication, accountability, and cross-functional partnership across matrixed delivery teams.
• Contribute reusable templates, best-practice playbooks, and process learnings to support the continuous improvement of the broader Digital Engagement operating model.

Points of Collaboration:

• Director, Digital Engagement: Direct reporting line; receives strategic direction, portfolio priorities, governance decisions, and budget allocations; escalates critical risks, resource bottlenecks, and policy trade-offs; presents operational recommendations for approval.
• AI-Ready Digital Engagement Innovation: Implements approved metadata models, taxonomy structures, content frameworks, and AI discoverability standards; provides practical operational feedback to help scale innovations.
• Brand and Commercial Marketing Teams: Aligns delivery plans with brand campaign calendars, product launches, regulatory label updates, and commercial objectives.
• Technology, Architecture, Publishing, and Analytics: Collaborates on technical requirements, user stories, CMS authoring, QA testing, release management, and performance measurement.
• Legal, Regulatory, Medical (MLR), Privacy, and Accessibility Teams: Coordinates submission packages, tracks review comments, and ensures all published experiences satisfy rigorous regulatory and compliance standards.
• Agencies and Third-Party Partners: Coordinates day-to-day task assignments, reviews deliverables, and tracks vendor delivery against contracted deliverables.

Required Qualifications and Experience:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, digital communications, information technology, or a related field.
• Experience: Minimum of 5 years of progressive experience in digital marketing operations, web channel delivery, digital project/product management, or digital agency account management.
• Execution Leadership: Proven track record of managing complex web operations, releases, and content lifecycles across multiple brand properties or digital touchpoints.
• Planning & Prioritization: Demonstrated capability in translating brand briefs and digital strategy into detailed operational requirements, structured sprint/release plans, backlogs, and risk mitigation strategies.
• Matrix Collaboration: Strong experience facilitating cross-functional delivery teams spanning commercial marketing, IT, development, UX/design, analytics, and regulatory/compliance stakeholders.
• Technical & Channel Acumen: Working knowledge of enterprise Content Management Systems (CMS), web analytics tools, digital accessibility standards (WCAG), answer engine optimization (AEO) and discoverability, and quality assurance practices.
• Communication Skills: Excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills with the ability to summarize operational challenges, synthesize trade-offs, and present recommendations to leadership.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree or relevant professional certifications.
• Experience within the pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare, or another highly regulated industry.
• Familiarity with healthcare professional and patient web properties, gated/authenticated digital experiences, or CRM/marketing automation integrations.
• Working exposure to structured metadata, semantic schemas, taxonomy governance, or artificial intelligence/answer engine optimization principles.
• Demonstrated experience guiding and mentoring cross-functional peers and team members in a matrixed environment without direct reporting authority.

Required Skills:

Account Management, Business Integrations, Content Management Systems (CMS), Cross-Functional Teamwork, Customer Engagement, Delivery Management, Digital Marketing, Digital Publications, Direct Marketing, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Information Technology (IT), Innovation, Life Sciences Industry, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Strategic Thinking, Web Accessibility, Website Operations, Website Optimization

Preferred Skills:

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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.

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The primary location for this posting is:

USA - Pennsylvania - North Wales (Upper Gwynedd)

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

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

$142,400.00 - $224,100.00

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.

Additional location(s): Please note the salary range above applies to the Primary Location of the position. Where a role has other listed locations, different compensation guidelines may apply. You may find the salary ranges for additional locations below. If the salary range is not listed for the location you are applying to, our Talent Acquisition team will provide further information to you relevant to your location.

Additional location(s) Compensation Information:

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:

No Travel Required

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

Job Posting End Date:

11/6/2026

*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.