At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.
Lilly's Software Product Engineering (SPE) organization builds the platforms and products that power how Lilly discovers medicines, runs clinical trials, manufactures at scale, brings therapies to market, and supports patients across their care journey. Our portfolio spans agentic AI platforms, drug discovery tooling, connected lab and clinical systems, patient-facing digital products, and enterprise developer infrastructure used across the company. SPE engineers ship software that is used daily by Lilly scientists, clinicians, commercial teams, and patients themselves.
We are growing our Bay Area engineering presence to be closer to the talent, partners, and pace of innovation that the region uniquely offers. As a Software Engineering Lead based in the San Francisco Bay Area, you will be a senior technical contributor and team leader working on the platforms and products at the core of SPE's portfolio — shaping architecture, raising the engineering bar, and helping us build software that meaningfully accelerates Lilly's mission.
What You'll Be Doing:
As a Software Engineering Lead, you will operate as both a hands-on senior engineer and a technical leader. You will own architecture and design for systems used across SPE, write production code on the highest-leverage components, and lead engineering teams delivering software used across Lilly. Specifically, you will:
- Lead architecture and design across multiple platform components in the SPE portfolio, making the technical decisions that determine how our systems scale, evolve, and integrate.
- Write production code on critical platform components — including core services, SDKs, and developer-facing APIs — and set the bar for code quality, testing, and operability across the team.
- Lead engineering teams of full-time engineers and partner resources, providing technical direction, design review, and day-to-day mentorship that develops the next generation of senior engineers.
- Partner with product managers, designers, architects, and SPE leadership to translate ambiguous problems into clear technical roadmaps, with realistic delivery plans and well-scoped milestones.
- Drive adoption of platform standards, architecture patterns, and engineering practices across SPE — including service design, API design, observability, security, and CI/CD.
- Evaluate emerging technologies — including agentic AI frameworks, LLM application patterns, and modern developer platforms — and build proofs of concept that move our roadmap forward.
- Work across SPE teams in Indianapolis, San Diego, the UK, and India, and with partners across Lilly Research Labs, Tech@Lilly, and the broader business, to ship integrated solutions.
- Bring an external perspective to internal work — staying current with how leading engineering organizations build, deploy, and operate software at scale, and applying that perspective to lift our practices.
What You Should Bring:
- Deep, hands-on expertise designing and shipping production software systems, with demonstrable examples of leading architecture and design for non-trivial, high-throughput, or high-reliability platforms.
- Strong programming skills in Python and TypeScript / JavaScript, with proficiency in at least one additional systems-oriented language (Go, Rust, Java, or similar) and the judgment to choose the right tool for the problem.
- Experience building and operating distributed systems on major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including containerized workloads on Kubernetes and event-driven or asynchronous architectures (Kafka, queues, streaming systems, or similar).
- Practical experience designing and building APIs and SDKs that other engineers depend on — REST, GraphQL, gRPC — with a strong sense for developer experience, versioning, and backward compatibility.
- Working fluency with the modern AI application stack — LLM APIs, retrieval and embeddings, evaluation, and ideally agentic patterns such as MCP, tool use, and orchestration frameworks.
- Solid grounding in data modeling and storage — SQL relational databases, plus working experience with at least one of: vector stores, document stores, search infrastructure, or analytical data platforms.
- Strong instincts for security, identity, and access — including OAuth/OIDC patterns, identity providers (Okta or similar), and the operational realities of running services in a regulated enterprise.
- Experience leading or significantly influencing engineering teams — through technical leadership, mentorship, design review, and the day-to-day work of raising a team's quality bar.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make complex technical tradeoffs clear to engineering peers, product partners, and senior leadership.
- High intellectual curiosity, strong external perspective, and a genuine interest in the problem space — building software that helps Lilly bring medicines to patients faster.
Your Basic Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated experience leading architecture, design, and delivery of production systems.
- Technical Experience with multiple programming languages, including at least Python and TypeScript / JavaScript.
- Experience delivering software across the full development lifecycle — design, development, testing, deployment, and operation — using modern engineering practices.
- Experience with DevOps practices and Linux-based container and cloud environments.
- Experience in data modeling and querying with SQL relational databases.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
- Prior experience as a tech lead, principal engineer, staff engineer, or engineering manager in a high-performing software organization.
- Experience building developer platforms, internal tools, or SDKs used by other engineering teams at scale.
- Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM application development, or AI-native developer tooling.
- Experience operating software in a regulated environment (life sciences, healthcare, financial services, or similar).
- Open-source contributions, technical writing, or conference talks that demonstrate engineering perspective and external impact.
Additional information
- This position is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will work closely with SPE teams across the globe, including colleagues in Indianapolis, San Diego, the UK, and India, so some travel is expected (a few times per year).
- This role is open to senior individual contributors looking to lead through technical depth, as well as candidates with prior engineering management experience who want to stay close to the code.
Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.
Lilly is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.
Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia Network, Black Employees at Lilly, Chinese Culture Network, Japanese International Leadership Network (JILN), Lilly India Network, Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), PRIDE (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN), Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL), enAble (for people with disabilities). Learn more about all of our groups.
Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is
$177,000 - $292,600
Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly’s compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.
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