Associate Director - AI Engineering

Eli Lilly Eli Lilly · Pharma · Bangalore, India

Associate Director of AI Engineering at Eli Lilly, responsible for leading a team to build and operationalize production-grade AI systems, including traditional ML and agentic AI (LLM/agent workflows, tool use, orchestration). Focus on establishing best practices, building reusable capabilities, implementing observability, and ensuring secure, compliant AI delivery in a regulated healthcare environment.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing team of ML/AI engineers and operations talent; set clear expectations on engineering quality, reliability, and productivity.
  2. Establish best practices for execution (planning, project management, technical design reviews, documentation, and continuous improvement).
  3. Collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, and infrastructure teams to design optimal end-to-end pipelines and AI product delivery.
  4. Build and operationalize reusable capabilities that enable teams to develop and deploy AI tools, assistants, and agents at scale, including standardized templates/SDKs, integration patterns, and deployment readiness.
  5. Implement end-to-end observability for AI services (pipelines, agents, and applications): monitoring, tracing, cost/usage visibility, and operational dashboards.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years relevant experience across software/ML engineering, MLOps, or AI operations
  • 3+ years leading teams and delivering across multiple stakeholders
  • Strong hands-on foundation in cloud-native engineering and DevOps/MLOps practices (containers, orchestration, CI/CD, automated testing, release discipline)
  • Experience operationalizing end-to-end ML solutions (training/serving/monitoring) and modern GenAI/agent workflows (evaluation, monitoring, lifecycle management)
  • Proven ability to build scalable operating models, enforce quality standards, and communicate trade-offs with senior stakeholders
  • Strong communication, collaboration, and people leadership skills

Nice to have

  • Experience with LLM/agent observability practices (tracing across prompt → retrieval/tool calls → response) and cost controls for GenAI systems
  • Experience with policy-as-code / compliance-ready audit logging patterns in enterprise environments
  • Experience in regulated domains (healthcare/life sciences/finance) operating under audit and compliance constraints
  • Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Mathematics or related field

What the JD emphasized

  • production-grade AI systems
  • full AI lifecycle
  • agentic AI systems
  • LLM/agent workflows
  • tool use
  • orchestration
  • reusable capabilities
  • RAG and agentic workflows
  • observability for AI services
  • incident and problem management
  • secure, compliant AI delivery
  • guardrails and responsible AI practices
  • regulated environments

Other signals

  • building and running production-grade AI systems
  • full AI lifecycle
  • agentic AI systems
  • LLM/agent workflows
  • tool use
  • orchestration
  • reusable capabilities
  • RAG and agentic workflows
  • observability for AI services
  • incident and problem management
  • secure, compliant AI delivery
  • guardrails and responsible AI practices
  • regulated environments