Reports To: Sr. Director, Sales Training & Commercial Effectiveness
About This Role:
The Director, MLR Operations owns the strategy, governance, and end-to-end operation of the Medical, Legal, Regulatory review process for the organization. This role ensures all promotional, medical, training, and other regulated materials move through review and approval accurately, compliantly, and on time. Beyond process execution, this person is the strategic owner of the MLR operating model — designing scalable workflows, setting governance standards, and serving as a trusted advisor to senior Medical, Legal, Regulatory, and Commercial leadership. Success requires professional assertiveness to hold senior stakeholders accountable, sound judgment to balance speed to balance business urgency, review capacity, and process requirements while ensuring compliance risks are surfaced to appropriate functional decision makers. The Director is accountable for the effectiveness, integrity and operational performance of the MLR process, while Medical, Legal, Regulatory and Compliance functions retain accountability for their respective substantive review decisions.
What You'll Do:
Strategic Process Ownership
Own the MLR operating model end-to-end — intake, routing, review cycles, approvals, and archiving — and continuously evolve it as volume, therapeutic areas, and regulatory expectations change
Set governance standards, SOPs, and best practices for the review process, and ensure consistent adoption across Medical, Legal, Regulatory, and Marketing
Serve as business owner for the technology ecosystem (e.g., Veeva Vault PromoMats), partnering with IT/Compliance on configuration, upgrades, and process automation opportunities
Identify systemic bottlenecks and lead cross-functional process improvement initiatives, using data to justify changes to senior stakeholders
Planning, Prioritization & Delivery
Build and maintain enterprise-wide review calendars across teams, launches, and material types (promotional, training, medical, and other)
Lead MLR operational readiness for new product launches, indications, label changes, and other high-volume business events, including submission volume forecasting, reviewer capacity planning, critical path calendars and escalation protocols.
Cross-Functional Leadership & Influence
Serve as the primary strategic point of coordination between Medical, Legal, Regulatory, Marketing, and Commercial leadership on all review matters
Facilitate and, where needed, redesign MLR review governance meetings to drive efficient, decisive outcomes among senior reviewers
Establish and reinforce clear roles, service-level expectations, timelines, and escalation protocols across reviewer functions and organizational levels; constructively address deviations that put quality, compliance, or business timelines at risk.
Build credibility and trusted-advisor relationships across the matrix; influence decisions and behavior change without direct authority
Proactively escalate risks to timelines or compliance with clear, data-backed rationale and recommended solutions, not just flagged problems
Role-based training and onboarding for material owners, reviewers, agencies and other stakeholders.
Establish company requirements for submissions and approvals for external agencies and partners to adhere to.
Reporting, Compliance & Continuous Improvement
Define and maintain a MLR performance framework including submission volume, cycle time, SLA adherence, review rounds, aging, etc. Translate insights into capacity plans, process improvements and leadership recommendations.
Ensure audit- and inspection readiness through accurate, well-governed review documentation and records retention
Stay current on evolving FDA, OPDP, and PhRMA Code expectations and partner with regulatory, legal, and compliance to translate evolving regulatory requirements, guidance, internal policies and enforcement trends into MLR process
May mentor or oversee junior process…