Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead

Eli Lilly · Indianapolis · $129,000–$189,200 (stated in the posting)

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At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us. 

Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead

At Lilly, we're at an inflection point where 150 years of pharmaceutical excellence meets the transformative power of artificial intelligence. Our mission to create medicines that make life better has never been more achievable than it is today. AI is fundamentally reshaping how we discover, develop, and deliver life-saving treatments to patients around the world. Tech@Lilly is building the digital and AI foundation of a modern pharmaceutical company, one where scalable platforms, trusted data, and intelligent automation help our scientists, clinicians, and business teams move faster and make better decisions. The solutions we build directly shorten the path from scientific discovery to patient impact. If you are passionate about engineering excellence and want your work to matter to patients, we invite you to join us and help shape how medicines are made and delivered for the next 150 years.

Role Overview:

The Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead is accountable for the technical success of AI agents, systems of agents, and AI products. For this role, you will operate as a hands-on tech lead: personally design, code, and deliver critical components (primarily in Python) while overseeing development teams through design reviews, technical guidance, and quality gates to ensure solutions are secure, scalable, compliant, and delivered with a bias for action.

This role provides technical leadership while driving architectural and engineering decisions, ensures high-quality delivery, and serves as the primary technical counterpart to delivery teams and business users. The Technical Lead balances business objectives, user experience, scalability, security, and maintainability to deliver sustainable technology solutions, while enabling domain teams within Lilly's federated delivery model.

Success in this role is measured by the quality and reliability of delivered solutions, the speed and predictability of technical delivery, reduction of technical debt and operational issues, adoption of engineering standards and best practices, and the technical capability and overall health of the product and team.

Primary Responsibilities:

Technical Direction & Leadership

• Own the overall technical direction, ensuring alignment with business strategy and product objectives
• Translate business requirements into clear technical designs and implementation plans
• Lead technical design reviews and architecture discussions with engineers, architects, and security partners
• Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks, platforms, and development approaches
• Ensure adherence to engineering standards, security requirements, and architectural principles

SWE Responsibilities

• Drive technical decisions and tradeoffs between speed, cost, quality, maintainability, and scalability
• Identify and mitigate technical risks early in the delivery lifecycle
• Review code and ensure adherence to development standards and best practices
• Monitor solution quality, performance, reliability, and technical health
• Establish testing strategies and oversee technical validation activities

Team Leadership

• Mentor developers and fosters technical growth across the team
• Coordinate technical work across developers, architects, security partners, and platform teams
• Assign and guide technical tasks while maintaining accountability for outcomes
• Promote continuous learning, innovation, and engineering excellence

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner with business to create solutions with high accuracy and usage rates
• Communicate technical risks, dependencies, and solution approaches to stakeholders
• Act as the primary escalation point for technical issues
• Align technology decisions with business strategy and product objectives

Basic Requirements:

• Bachelors in Computer Science or a related field, such as Engineering or Information Technology.
• 8+ years of software development or software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams or large technical initiatives.
• Experience using cloud platforms, software architecture, APIs, data integration, and modern development practices.
• Experience influencing technical decisions across cross-functional teams.

Preferred Experience

• Advanced degree such as Masters or PhD
• Experience delivering technology solutions in a regulated industry such as pharmaceutical, healthcare, or life sciences, including familiarity with GxP and computer systems validation.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI and machine learning solutions, including LLM-based and agentic applications and the engineering practices that support them.
• Experience with DevSecOps, infrastructure as code, and automated testing and deployment pipelines.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong mentoring and coaching skills, with a record of growing engineers into senior technical roles.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and making sound decisions with incomplete information.
• Relevant certifications such as cloud architecture (AWS)

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 (AMECA), Black Employees at Lilly (BE@Lilly), Chinese Culture Network (CCN), EnAble, Evolve, Lilly Indian Network (LIN), Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), Pride (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN) and Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL).

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location.  The anticipated wage for this position is

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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