Director, Global Applications

Role details

Overview

The Director, Global Applications & Scientific Operations leads MSD's worldwide applications strategy and operating model. This leader builds one connected scientific community across Global Applications, R&D Applications, and Regional Field Applications, aligning talent and priorities to deliver annual commercial commitments while strengthening long-term innovation, capability, and customer impact.

The Director partners with Commercial, R&D, Product Management, Marketing, Service, and Quality to translate customer workflows and market needs into applications priorities, new-product requirements, launch readiness, reusable scientific content, and capability investments. The role balances immediate business needs with a rolling three-year plan for talent, technology, scientific novelty, and operational improvement.

Responsibilities

• Commercial momentum: Align the global applications talent pool, technical expertise, and capacity to priority markets, strategic opportunities, customer escalations, and AOP commitments. Establish transparent prioritization and impact measures.
• Global operating model: Define strategy, roles, decision rights, governance, planning cadences, support tiers, and handoffs across Global, R&D, and Regional Field Applications while preserving regional commercial accountability.
• Field Applications partnership: Work with regional leaders through a dotted-line relationship to align technical standards, talent development, resource deployment, field training, escalation support, and reusable content priorities.
• Scientific and sales enablement: Ensure delivery of field training and sales-training content. Set priorities for market-relevant collateral supporting in-market products, including webinars, seminars, technical tips, web series, application notes, and workflow guidance.
• Talent and culture: Lead, coach, and develop global scientific talent. Establish competency models, succession plans, career pathways, mentoring, onboarding, and skill-based development programs that support mobility and retention.
• Knowledge management: Sponsor the worldwide framework for creating, reviewing, approving, finding, reusing, maintaining, and retiring applications knowledge and training assets. Promote collaboration and reduce duplicated effort across regions.
• Long-term growth and NPI: Own a rolling three-year applications plan for scientific novelty and NPI execution. Ensure programs include customer workflows, validated methods, reference data, training, content, and regional readiness before launch.
• Voice of Customer and product development: Represent the scientific customer in research and NPD. Own workflow definition and applications input to product specifications, data validation, applications feasibility studies, field testing, ideation, and design reviews.
• External scientific leadership: Increase the team’s presence through conferences, publications, webinars, standards activities, collaborations, and KOL relationships. Align targeted KOL campaigns with strategic markets and portfolio priorities.
• Operational excellence: Use demand, capacity, quality, adoption, training, content, and customer-impact metrics to identify gaps, improve processes, manage short- and long-term resource needs, and communicate risks and trade-offs to leadership.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, polymer science, or a related scientific discipline; PhD preferred.
• Significant leadership experience in applications, R&D, product development, scientific operations, or a technical commercial organization, including leadership of global or highly matrixed teams.
• Demonstrated success translating customer workflows, market needs, and commercial priorities into portfolio, product, capability, content, and resource decisions.
• Strong people-development, succession-planning, change-leadership, and organizational-design capabilities, with the ability to influence across solid-line and dotted-line relationships.
• Executive-level communication and stakeholder-management skills, with scientific credibility among customers, scientists, commercial leaders, and external experts.
• Experience in thermal analysis, rheology, or adjacent materials-characterization technologies and markets preferred.

Company Description:

Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT) is a global leader in life sciences and diagnostics, dedicated to accelerating the benefits of pioneering science through analytical technologies, informatics, and service. With a focus on regulated, high-volume testing environments, our innovative portfolio harnesses deep scientific expertise across chemistry, physics, and biology. We collaborate with customers around the world to advance the release of effective, high-quality medicines, ensure the safety of food and water, and drive better patient outcomes by detecting diseases earlier, managing routine infections, and combating antibiotic resistance.

Through a shared culture of relentless innovation, our passionate team of ~16,000 colleagues turn scientific challenges into breakthroughs that improve lives worldwide.

*Diversity and inclusion are fundamental to our core values at Waters Corporation. It benefits our employees, our products, our customers and our community. Waters complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws. Qualified applicants are considered without regard to sex, race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, marital status (including civil unions), military service, veteran status, pregnancy (including childbirth and related medical conditions), genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, legally recognized disability, domestic violence victim status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Waters is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All hiring decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.*