Executive Director, Head of Enterprise Contracting

Job description

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 Bristol Myers Squibb is seeking an Executive Director, Head of Enterprise Contracting to lead and transform contracting across the enterprise. Reporting to the SVP, Enterprise Law and Chief Privacy Officer, this is first and foremost a leadership and transformation role: the leader will define the vision for how a global, heavily regulated biopharmaceutical company contracts, and will build the organization, infrastructure, and operating model to deliver for the enterprise with quality, speed and scale. This leader will own the strategy, design, and day-to-day operations of contracting for BMS. A central part of the mandate is building a team with deep expertise across the full range of contract types handled by a heavily regulated global pharmaceutical company, spanning the entire value chain, from discovery and research through development, manufacturing and supply, commercialization, and patient access, alongside the business functions who rely on this critical work. The role carries the mandate to build a scalable, technology-enabled, enterprise-wide contracting capability, spanning infrastructure, technology deployment, template and fallback maintenance, policy, and operations, and to lead the change management required to bring the enterprise along without interruption to delivery. This is a high-visibility role at the intersection of legal, operations, technology, and business strategy, ensuring that contracting at BMS is fast, consistent, risk-calibrated, and a source of competitive advantage for the enterprise. The role sits within a centralized expertise function supporting a global organization in 60+ countries. Key Responsibilities Strategic Leadership Define and execute the enterprise-wide contracting strategy. Serve as a member of the Enterprise Law leadership team, contributing to function-wide strategy, governance design, and resource prioritization. Act as the enterprise's senior voice on contracting strategy, representing the function in cross-enterprise initiatives and with senior leadership across Legal, Procurement, Business Development, IT, and the business units. Champion a tiered service delivery model: develop centralized frameworks, standards, and self-service capabilities that empower the business and business-line attorneys, while ensuring complex, novel, and high-risk matters are escalated to and owned by the right specialists. Enterprise Contracting Operations Oversee teams supporting the preparation and negotiation of contracts enterprise-wide, including the handling of legal contract escalations, ensuring consistent, high-quality, and timely execution in coordination with other contracting resources across the organization. Own the operational performance of contracting globally: cycle time, throughput, quality, risk outcomes, and business partner experience. Redesign and continuously optimize intake, triage, and prioritization processes to route work to the right resource level (self-service, business-line attorneys, contracting specialists, escalation teams). Establish and manage metrics and KPIs to measure contracting efficiency, cycle time, and risk outcomes, and use them to drive continuous improvement and transparent reporting to leadership. Contracting Infrastructure & Capability Building Build an enterprise-wide contracting capability, including the operating model, organizational design, processes, and governance required to serve the full enterprise at scale. Own and maintain the enterprise library of templates, riders, fallback positions, and negotiation playbooks; ensure they are current, harmonized, and adopted consistently by attorneys and business partners globally. Define and maintain enterprise contracting policy and standards, including delegation of authority, risk thresholds, and approval frameworks. Develop shared risk frameworks, escalation protocols, and playbooks that create leverage and consistency across all contracting categories. Design and deliver training and toolkits enabling self-service contracting and business-line attorney support at scale. Technology & Automation Lead the selection, deployment, and optimization of contracting technology, including contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems, AI-enabled contracting tools, and workflow automation. Partner with IT, ADP practice areas, and Legal Operations to ensure contracting technology is integrated with enterprise systems and data governance standards. Leverage AI tooling and automation to streamline drafting, review, negotiation, and reporting, while maintaining appropriate legal oversight and risk controls. Establish data and reporting infrastructure to provide enterprise visibility into contract portfolios, obligations, and risk exposure. Contracting Strategy & Change Management Lead the strategic design and transformation of the enterprise contracting model, in alignment with enterprise-wide contracting modernization efforts. Champion change management across the contracting ecosystem: define the future-state vision, build stakeholder alignment, sequence and communicate changes, and drive adoption among attorneys and business partners globally. Serve as a senior leader in enterprise initiatives and contract lifecycle management optimization, ensuring contracting practices shape and integrate with the broader Legal operating model. Identify synergies across contracting categories (shared templates, playbooks, risk frameworks, and escalation protocols) to increase leverage and consistency. Team Leadership & Development Build a team with expertise spanning the full spectrum of contract types handled by a heavily regulated global pharmaceutical company, across the entire value chain, from discovery through development, manufacturing, commercialization, and patient access, as well as the enterprise’s enabling and corporate functions. Directly manage senior contracting leads across global teams; provide coaching, strategic context, transparency, and sponsorship to support their growth. Build a collaborative, cross-trained, accountable team culture across a global, distributed contracting organization. Assess team structure, capacity, and skills against the enterprise book of work; recommend and implement organizational adjustments as the function scales. Attract, develop, and retain top contracting and legal operations talent worldwide. Qualifications JD from an accredited law school; active bar membership in good standing. 15+ years of relevant legal experience, including significant experience in commercial contracting and legal operations in the pharmaceutical, biotech, or healthcare sector, with exposure to the breadth of contract types across the full value chain of a regulated global life sciences company. Demonstrated success as an enterprise leader and transformation agent, with a track record of setting vision and mobilizing large organizations through significant operational change. Proven experience building or transforming a large-scale contracting function, including operating model design, process redesign, and tiered service delivery models. Demonstrated experience deploying contracting technology, including CLM systems and AI-enabled tools, across a complex global organization. Demonstrated people leadership experience, including managing senior attorneys and team leads and leading large, globally distributed team