
Senior Agile Lead, AI Enabled Product Delivery at Merck
About the role
Job Description:
We are looking for a senior, highly adaptable Agile Lead with strong strengths in delivery leadership, stakeholder communication, and team coaching, and solid technical awareness of AI enabled and custom AI product development.
This role is first and foremost about excellent agile delivery leadership: enabling teams to deliver outcomes, helping stakeholders navigate complexity, and continuously adapting ways of working. At the same time, it requires practical AI fluency—enough to engage credibly with engineers and AI specialists and to support teams building custom AI solutions.
The ideal candidate is a trusted delivery partner to leadership, a coach to teams, and a pragmatic change agent who evolves agile practices as technology, context, and stakeholder needs change.
Key Responsibilities:
Agile Leadership, Delivery & Team Coaching (Primary Focus)
- • Take active ownership of delivery outcomes, partnering closely with Product, Tech Lead, and Engineering Manager.
- • Act as a delivery leader, supporting teams in meeting commitments, managing dependencies, and addressing risks early.
- • Operate as part of a tight delivery triad with Tech Lead and Engineering Manager, aligning delivery plans, technical direction, capacity, and team health.
- • Coach teams to own delivery outcomes, balancing speed, quality, technical sustainability, and learning.
- • Adapt agile practices (Scrum, Kanban, hybrid) to optimize flow.
- • Support teams through change and complexity while maintaining focus, accountability, and psychological safety.
- AI Awareness & Custom Engineering Enablement (Secondary Focus)
- • Support teams delivering AI enabled products and custom AI engineering solutions.
- • Maintain working knowledge of current AI trends, including LLM based systems and AI augmented workflows.
- • Partner with engineers and AI specialists to ensure ways of working support experimentation and learning.
- Stakeholder Communication & Metrics Focused Delivery
- • Serve as a key interface between teams and senior stakeholders, grounding discussions in clear delivery metrics and evidence.
- • Establish and evolve meaningful delivery metrics (e.g., flow, predictability, quality, risk signals) to support transparency and decision making.
- • Translate delivery data into clear, actionable insights, avoiding vanity metrics or reporting for its own sake.
- • Use metrics to enable better conversations around trade offs, priorities, capacity, and risk.
- Ways of Working & Continuous Improvement
- • Shape and evolve organizational ways of working as technology and delivery models change.
- • Promote learning, inspection, and adaptation at team and system level.
Required Experience & Skills:
Agile Expertise
- • Extensive senior level experience as an Agile Lead, Scrum Master, or Agile Coach.
- • Strong track record in delivery ownership, team coaching, and stakeholder engagement.