Principal Production Engineer - Operations

Eli Lilly And Company; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 6,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Eli Lilly And Company in Hyderabad seeks a Principal Production Engineer - Operations to serve as the final escalation authority on shift and on-call anchor for the team. You will drive incident triage, root-cause analyses, and cross-stack debugging across low-code, SaaS, and enterprise stacks.

The role demands strong leadership, ability to anchor incident response, and collaboration with engineering leads across multiple shifts to maintain continuous operations.

Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years in production engineering or operations
• Location: Hyderabad (Onsite)
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Job Family: R3 - Operations / SRE-aligned Support

Responsibilities

• Anchor on-call leadership for your shift and coordinate L1/L2/L3 engineers.
• Lead real-time triage, dispatch, and handoffs to ensure incident continuity.
• Perform root-cause analyses and drive patterns into runbooks or automation.

Skills

Incident management

Root-cause analysis

Cross-stack debugging

On-call leadership

Tools

Power Platform

Power Automate

Salesforce

SharePoint

Java/JVM

.NET

Node.js

Python

Power BI

Tableau

SQL

NoSQL

Job description

Role Summary

Principal Production Engineer - Operations

As a Principal Production Engineer in Operations, you are the final-escalation authority within your shift and the named on-call anchor for the team. You drive root-cause analyses to engineering-grade quality before handoff to the SRE engineering practice in the same pillar, and you are the last call before the engineering lead is engaged.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with real shift weight and real authority. The team supports continuous operations across multiple shifts, and you will anchor on-call coverage for your assigned shift while partnering with the engineering lead on cross-shift incident command.

What sets this seat apart from a single-stack senior engineer is the breadth of technology you operate across. The estate covers low-code platforms, SaaS ecosystems, traditional enterprise stacks, RPA and automation tooling, integration middleware, and data and analytics platforms. You are expected to debug across all of them - not by memorising every product, but by reading logs, traces, code, and configuration in any reasonable stack and isolating where it broke. Candidates who thrive in this role pick up unfamiliar tech in weeks, not quarters.

Responsibilities

1) Shift anchor and on-call leadership

• Hold the on-call anchor role for your shift and lead the L1/L2/L3 operations engineers working alongside you; carry the page that the engineering lead does not.
• Direct triage and dispatch in real time: pull L1 and L2 to the work they can own, keep senior capacity on the hard problems, and step in only where the call genuinely needs you.
• Make incident-disposition decisions within your shift (escalate, resolve, or open a problem record) with disciplined judgment, and coach your team to make the same calls when you are not on the bridge.
• Run effective shift handoffs to maintain operational continuity across globally distributed teams, and raise the bar on handoff quality so the next shift inherits clarity, not noise.

2) Multi-stack debugging and major incident response

• Be the final-escalation point before the engineering lead, and earn the right to be the last call by consistently isolating fault domains across the stack faster than anyone else on shift.
• Debug across very different technology families - low-code (Power Platform, Power Automate), SaaS (Salesforce/SFDC, SharePoint), enterprise stacks (Java/JVM, .NET, Node.js, Python), RPA (Automation Anywhere or equivalent), integration middleware, and data/analytics platforms (Power BI, Tableau, SQL and NoSQL stores) - using logs, traces, metrics, code reading, and first-principles reasoning. Deep domain knowledge of every product is not the bar; the bar is finding where it broke and stopping the bleed.
• Lead in-shift major incident execution and partner with the engineering lead on cross-shift incident command. Own the bridge, drive comms, and keep the response moving.
• Coordinate cross-team response across engineering, product, platform, security, and vendor teams when needed, and hold each owner to clear next steps and timestamps.

3) Root-cause engineering and pattern feedback

• Drive root-cause analyses to engineering-grade quality before handoff to the SRE engineering practice in the same pillar, covering symptom, timeline, fault domain, root cause, contributing factors, and the engineering work that follows.
• Partner with the engineering lead on problem management for chronic incident patterns, and convert recurring incidents into runbooks, automation, or alert tuning that L1 and L2 can execute on their own next time.
• Identify cross-product, cross-stack failure patterns across application, integration, infrastructure, data, and identity layers, and feed them upstream to the right engineering team with enough evidence that the fix is unambiguous.

Requirements

• Experience: 10+ years
• Location: Hyderabad (Onsite)
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Job Family: R3 - Operations / Application Support / Production Engineering / SRE-aligned Support