Associate Director, Enterprise Context & Data Foundations

The Associate Director, Enterprise Context & Data Foundations role is responsible for accelerating business value from enterprise data by establishing the semantic, contextual, and business foundations that enable analytics, AI, Copilots, and agentic products at scale.

This leader serves as the bridge between business stakeholders, product teams, and technology organizations, ensuring data is organized, contextualized, and governed in a way that enables trusted decision-making and AI-powered business outcomes.

The role focuses on defining business meaning, reusable context, semantic models, business rules, metadata, taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge assets that power agentic solutions across the enterprise. Engineering teams provide the technical implementation while this leader drives vision, priorities, adoption, and business alignment., Enterprise Context Strategy

• Define and execute the strategy for Enterprise Context and Data Foundations.
• Establish a scalable framework for business context, semantic models, business definitions, metrics, taxonomies, and knowledge assets.
• Drive the evolution from foundational data assets to AI-ready contextualized data products.
• Partner with business and product leaders to identify opportunities where context can accelerate insights, automation, and decision-making.

Agentic Business Enablement

• Enable enterprise adoption of AI, Copilot, and agentic solutions through trusted business context.
• Partner with business teams to understand workflows, decision points, and information needs.
• Identify opportunities where agents can reduce manual effort, improve productivity, and accelerate business outcomes.
• Ensure agentic solutions are grounded in trusted business definitions, metrics, policies, and relationships.

Semantic & Context Foundations

• Lead the creation and governance of semantic models, business metrics, dimensions, and reusable business concepts.
• Establish enterprise standards for business metadata, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and context assets.
• Drive consistency in critical business definitions across domains and products.
• Partner with domain teams to build reusable context that can be leveraged across analytics, applications, and AI solutions.

Data Product & Business Adoption

• Partner with Data Product Owners to ensure foundational data products are discoverable, trusted, and consumable.
• Drive adoption of enterprise data assets across business functions.
• Measure utilization, business value, and AI readiness of data products.
• Champion a product mindset focused on usability, enablement, and measurable business outcomes.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Work across business, analytics, product management, architecture, governance, and engineering teams.
• Facilitate alignment around business meaning, data ownership, and context standards.
• Influence enterprise-wide practices without direct ownership of all participating teams.
• Build and lead a community of stakeholders focused on context, knowledge management, and AI enablement.

Agentic Workforce Transformation

• Accelerate productivity through skills, agents, and process automation.
• Enable teams to adopt agentic ways of working that improve speed, quality, and scale.
• Establish reusable patterns for AI and agent adoption across the organization.

• 8+ years leading data, analytics, business intelligence, product, or business transformation initiatives.
• Experience working across business and technology organizations.
• Strong understanding of enterprise data, analytics, and AI ecosystems.
• Proven ability to drive cross-functional alignment and influence senior stakeholders.
• Experience translating business objectives into scalable data and AI capabilities.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and organizational leadership skills.

Preferred

• Experience with data products, metadata management, governance, or knowledge management.
• Familiarity with semantic layers, metrics frameworks, business glossaries, knowledge graphs, ontologies, or AI enablement platforms.
• Experience supporting AI, Copilot, or agentic solution adoption.
• Understanding of modern data platforms, lakehouse architectures, and enterprise data ecosystems., Asset Management, Asset Management, Benefits Management, Business Alignment, Business Decisions, Business Metrics, Business Models, Business Workflow Analysis, Data Access, Data Assessment, Data Management, Data Stewardship, Data Strategies, Enterprise Data Management, Knowledge Management, Management System Development, Partner Ecosystem Strategy, Product Management, Product Marketing, Requirements Management, Stakeholder Relationship Management, Strategic Planning, System Designs, Technology Alignment, Transactional Data {+ 1 more}, Valid Driving License

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 (https://www.msdprivacy.com/us/en/CCPA-notice/)

The salary range for this role is

$142,400.00 - $224,100.00

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.