At Bristol Myers Squibb, our employees often ask, “Who are you working for?”—a question that fuels collaboration, accountability, and urgency in our work. Our purpose-driven culture inspires us to discover, develop, and deliver innovative medicines to prevail over serious diseases. We offer uniquely interesting and meaningful work, opportunities for growth, and a supportive environment that values inclusion, wellbeing, flexibility, and comprehensive benefits.
This is work that transforms the lives of patients, and the careers of those who do it.
Position Summary
The Director, Program Management Systems & Infrastructure owns the design of how program managers across pharmaceutical development actually work — the stage-gate models, governance templates, and cross-functional workflows they follow — and ensures those processes are adopted in practice, not just documented. This is a hybrid role spanning business process design and training/change management, built on the premise that a process nobody is trained on and doesn't change their behavior isn't a process at all — it's a document.
This person will partner closely with practicing PMs, R&D functional leads (clinical, regulatory, CMC, nonclinical), and the PM Systems & Infrastructure team to translate development-program complexity into workflows people can actually follow, and then drive the organizational adoption required to make those workflows stick.
Key Responsibilities
Process Design & Governance (~50%)
- ✓Own and continuously improve the stage-gate model, decision criteria, and governance cadence used by Program Managers across development programs
- ✓Design and standardize processes related to core PM systems: including governance, risk registers, decision logs, integrated timeline templates
- ✓Facilitate cross-functional process design sessions with clinical, regulatory, CMC, and nonclinical stakeholders to ensure PM system workflows reflect real dependencies, not idealized ones
- ✓Identify process and system gaps and inconsistencies across programs/therapeutic areas and lead root-cause analysis when governance breaks down (e.g., late escalations, misaligned timelines)
- ✓Maintain a living library of SOPs, playbooks, and process documentation, ensuring version control and regulatory-audit readiness where applicable
Training & Change Management (~40%)
- ✓Design and deliver onboarding curricula for new program managers, covering both tools and the underlying system governance philosophy
- ✓Build job aids, quick-reference guides, and role-based training paths for PMs at different experience levels
- ✓Lead change management for every process or system rollout: stakeholder impact assessment, communication plans, training delivery, adoption tracking, and feedback loops
- ✓Establish and chair a practitioner steering group (working PMs, not just leadership) to pressure-test new processes before wide release
- ✓Track adoption metrics (e.g., template usage, governance deck compliance, training completion) and report on process health to leadership
Cross-Functional Leadership (~10%)
- ✓Represent PM process and enablement needs in the broader PM Systems & Infrastructure roadmap, alongside dashboarding/tooling counterparts
- ✓Act as the primary escalation point when new systems or reporting requirements (from IT, Quality, or Regulatory) require a change to PM-facing process
Qualifications & Experience
- ✓8–12+ years of experience in pharmaceutical/biotech drug development, including significant time as a program manager or in a PMO/R&D operations role
- ✓Demonstrated experience designing or overhauling governance processes (stage-gates, decision frameworks, risk management) in a regulated drug development environment
- ✓Direct experience building and delivering training programs or leading organizational change initiatives — this cannot be purely theoretical; the candidate should be able to speak to specific rollouts they drove and what adoption looked like before and after
- ✓Strong facilitation skills; comfortable running cross-functional working sessions with senior stakeholders from clinical, regulatory, CMC, and finance
- ✓Working knowledge of common PM tools in pharma (e.g., MS Project, Smartsheet, Planisware) — deep technical administration is not required, but fluency in how these tools support governance is
- ✓Excellent written communication; this role will personally author templates, SOPs, and training materials that PMs across the organization will use daily
We hire for skills and capabilities, not just credentials – if this role excites you, but doesn’t perfectly match your resume, we encourage you to apply anyway.
Compensation Overview
Madison - Giralda - NJ - US: $190,060 - $230,308
Princeton - NJ - US: $190,060 - $230,308