Director, Global Data Strategy & Operations

The Director, Global Data Strategy & Operations will define and execute the commercial data strategy for the global commercial organization. This leader sets the vision for how commercial data is acquired, structured, governed, and activated across forecasting, reporting, analytics, and AI systems and agents. Partnering closely with senior commercial leadership, IT, Procurement, and analytics teams, the director will ensure that data investments are business‑aligned, compliant, and scalable, reporting directly to the Executive Director, Operations Strategy and Business Insights. 
 

Responsibilities 

This is a hands-on role that will execute and design along with directing vendor activity. 
 

Data Acquisition Strategy  

• Collaborate with business partners to determine CYTK data needs to drive strategic decisions across brands, market access, field engagement, and patient support. 

• Manage budget, contracts, renewals, and resource allocations for all data- and reporting-related vendors and tools. 

• Track vendor value and ROI to ensure spending aligns with prioritized commercial use cases. 
   

Data Architecture, Governance & Platforms 

• Own the overall commercial data architecture, including the blueprint for the data platform (warehouse/lakehouse, data marts, semantic layer, and data products). 

• Establish and enforce data standards, governance processes, and controls to keep data accurate, consistent, compliant, HIPAA-safe, and ready for downstream use. 

• Lead the design and evolution of commercial data models and pipelines with IT and data engineering, providing hands-on review and guidance. 

• Ensure that structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (e.g., CRM notes, omnichannel interactions, documents) are captured, tagged, and modeled as high-quality context data that could be used for many solutions including AI and LLM-based. 
   

Data & Strategy 

• Define and maintain the multi-year vision and roadmap for commercial data, aligned with brand, market access, field, and patient engagement strategies. 

• Establish and oversee commercial master data management (MDM) for key entities (e.g., HCPs, HCOs, accounts, products, payers), ensuring consistent, governed master records that underpin reporting, analytics, and AI use cases. 

• Identify and prioritize high-value advanced analytics use cases (e.g., next-best-action, omnichannel optimization, patient journey analytics, field force effectiveness) with senior stakeholders. 

• Set principles for how commercial data is structured and packaged for future AI agents and LLM-based applications, in partnership with IT, security, and compliance. 

Data Vendors & Integrations  

• Serve as primary owner for external commercial data vendors, managing contracts, SLAs, troubleshooting, and quality issues. 

• Own the roadmap for integrating, transforming, and modeling commercial data sources, ensuring vendor solutions align to CYTK reference architectures and standards. 

• Monitor operational data accuracy and resolve issues quickly when data loads or pipelines break. 
   

Data Platform & Enablement 

• Drive simplification and standardization across the data ecosystem. 

• Work closely with IT on platform needs, upgrades, and day-to-day reliability, including cloud modernization and data observability best practices. 

• Champion reusable, well-documented data products and certified datasets that support both BI and AI/ML workloads. 
   

Reporting & Business Partner Support 

• Partner with the Business Reporting team to ensure they have the data required to deliver dashboarding and reporting needs 

• Translate business requirements into clear data requirements and oversee development to meet timelines and quality expectations. 

• Serve as a strategic adviser to senior commercial leaders on how data can drive brand performance, field productivity, and customer engagement. 
   

Operational Leadership 

• Oversee data ingestion, modeling, quality, and reporting support, including internal and vendor resources. 

• Ensure SLAs for data operations and data availability are consistently met. 

• Provide training and guidance on how data sources, pipelines, and datasets work and how to use them effectively. 

Qualifications 

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Data Management, Information Systems, Computer Science, Life Sciences, or significant relevant experience. 

• 12+ years of experience in data management, data governance, or enterprise data strategy, with leadership responsibility in global organizations. 

• Experience within biotechnology or pharmaceuticals is strongly preferred, with deep understanding of pharmaceutical commercialization (e.g., patient-level claims, EHR/EMR, specialty pharmacy/hub and copay data, field activity/CRM, payer and market access data). 

• Proven experience designing and implementing enterprise data governance and data quality frameworks, and partnering with Procurement, IT, and business stakeholders. 

• Experience leading the design and implementation of modern data platforms (e.g., cloud data warehouse/lake house, ELT/ETL pipelines, semantic/metric layers) with strong familiarity with at least one major cloud ecosystem (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP). 

• Experience enabling AI and advanced analytics use cases by designing data models, semantic layers, and metadata structures that support AI agents, LLMs, and retrieval-augmented generation. 

• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with a track record of influencing senior executives and leading change across global organizations.