Agentic AI Solutions, Associate Director

Eli Lilly and Company; Indianapolis (IN); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis seeks an AI Solutions Engineer to build agentic AI tools and knowledge extraction systems for PRD’s ESCO. You will collaborate with sourcing operations and category managers to turn complex supplier data into decision-ready AI workflows, ensuring governance and scalable deployment.

Ideal candidates bring advanced ML experience, strong Python/R skills, and the ability to translate business needs into technical solutions across CDMO/CMO documents and supplier

Qualifications

• Earned Master’s degree in Computational/Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, or related STEM field.
• 3+ years of experience in AI/ML solution development in Python/R and related ecosystems.
• Strong communication and ability to translate business needs into AI/ML workflows.

Responsibilities

• Partner with ESCO sourcing operations leads and category managers to identify high‑value AI, ML, and automation opportunities.
• Translate stakeholder needs into practical AI tools, designs, acceptance criteria, and delivery plans.
• Build and deploy AI‑enabled applications and workflows for decision support and process automation.

Job description

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.

Organization Overview

At Lilly, we serve an extraordinary purpose. For nearly 150 years we have worked tirelessly to discover medicines that make life better. In Product Research and Development (PRD), we transform molecules into medicines, working through an increasingly external partner network across drug substance, drug product, and analytical services.

PRD's External Supply Chain & Operations (ESCO) team stewards this external partner network — delivering supplier excellence, systematic and scalable sourcing workflows, supply chain design, technical-transfer processes, and end-to-end network performance across drug substance, drug product, and analytical services.

As ESCO scales a harmonized supplier governance model and moves toward AI-enabled, agentic sourcing operations, it requires a net-new capability: hands‑on agentic AI and applied ML expertise dedicated to building practical tools and autonomous agents for PRD's sourcing systems and business processes. This is a new position for the team, modeled on the agentic AI engineering capability DDCS has built within its Digital Transformation and Data Science team, adapted for ESCO's external‑sourcing context.

The Opportunity

Today, ESCO sourcing leads spend significant time manually working through CDMO/CMO proposals, capacity data, technical‑transfer records, audit and quality documentation, contracts, and supplier scorecards scattered across email, SharePoint, and Teams — to answer questions such as which partners have capacity for a given modality next quarter, how a partner performs across modalities, or where a program's technical transfer stands and what is blocking it. This role builds the agentic AI tools and systems that turn that manual, document‑heavy work into fast, reliable, AI‑assisted decisions.

Key Responsibilities

AI Solutions Engineering & Practical Tool Delivery

• Partner with ESCO sourcing operations leads and category managers to identify, prioritize, and scope high‑value opportunities where agentic AI, machine learning, and automation can improve speed, productivity, insight generation, and decision quality across the CDMO/CMO network.
• Translate stakeholder needs into practical AI tools, technical designs, acceptance criteria, and delivery plans that fit real sourcing, supplier‑management, and technical‑transfer workflows.
• Build and deploy AI‑enabled applications, services, and workflows that integrate models, sourcing data sources, document collections, and user‑facing interfaces for decision support and workflow automation.

Agentic Sourcing AI Systems & Knowledge Extraction

• Create reusable agent skills, task harnesses, validators, run ledgers, and reproducibility controls that allow AI agents to execute diverse, long‑running sourcing tasks reliably (e.g., capacity assessment, RFx analysis, technical‑transfer status tracking).
• Build agentic knowledge extraction and question‑answering systems for structured and unstructured sourcing content, including CDMO proposals, quality/audit reports, contracts, capacity data, technical‑transfer records, and supplier scorecards.
• Design evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, and human‑in‑the‑loop escalation patterns so agentic outputs are auditable, traceable, and appropriate for high‑consequence sourcing and supply‑continuity decisions.
• Apply knowledge graphs, data ontologies, and structured knowledge representation where they improve retrieval, traceability, and reuse across the supplier and CDMO network.

Decision Support & Workflow Transformation

• Build the PRD Supply Chain Intelligence (AI) agent end to end — from feasibility through pilot to production — as a core deliverable of this role, in coordination with Tech@Lilly and PRD Strategy's End‑to‑End Supply Chain Design Process.
• Turn information from CDMO/CMO documents, sourcing systems, and business processes into faster insights, stronger judgment, and improved ways of working across ESCO.
• Communicate model outputs, evidence, assumptions, limitations, uncertainty, and recommended actions through clear visualizations and decision‑support outputs that influence solution adoption and sourcing decisions.

Reliability, Validation, MLOps & Responsible AI

• Champion software engineering best practices including version control, automated testing, CI/CD, containers, documentation, reproducibility, observability, and fit‑for‑purpose MLOps/agent‑ops practices.
• Develop validation, monitoring, documentation, and model‑risk approaches aligned with intended use, responsible AI principles, GxP awareness, and regulatory expectations where applicable to sourcing and supply‑chain decisions.
• Leverage cloud infrastructure to develop, test, deploy, and scale agentic workflows, document‑intelligence systems, and analytics applications supporting ESCO.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration & Scientific/Business Translation

• Partner across ESCO, PRD Strategy, Procurement, PRD functional leaders (Drug Substance, Drug Product, Analytical, Packaging), and Tech@Lilly to align agentic tools with enterprise data and platform standards, including the Portfolio Intelligence Hub and the CS&D Supply Chain Control Tower.
• Coordinate with Tech@Lilly's formal CRO data exchange and digital workflow for CMC lab experiments so ESCO's agentic tools adopt existing digital exchange pathways rather than creating parallel ones.
• Translate complex AI findings into clear narratives and business cases that influence solution adoption, workflow redesign, and sourcing‑team priorities.

Capability Building, External Leadership & Mentorship

• Advance ESCO's technology roadmap for practical agentic AI tools, document intelligence, and reusable knowledge systems, drawing on DDCS's Digital Transformation and Data Science team as a cross‑org reference and collaboration partner.
• Share methods, reference patterns, and lessons learned that help ESCO embed agentic AI into everyday sourcing work.
• Mentor team members and partners on reliable agentic systems, responsible AI, and rigorous communication of model assumptions, uncertainty, and decision impact.
• Stay current with the fast‑moving agentic AI and LLM landscape and bring new tools, frameworks, and techniques into ESCO's practice where they add real value.

First-Year Outcomes

Success in this role is defined by what exists after hire:

• By month 6: First agentic AI pilot (e.g., CDMO capacity or technical‑transfer status assistant) live with named users; document‑intelligence extraction pipeline operating over a defined CDMO/CMO document set; PRD Supply Chain Intelligence agent feasibility assessment complete with a go/no‑go recommendation.
• By month 12: PRD Supply Chain Intelligence agent in production pilot with defined evaluation criteria and monitoring in place; at least one additional agentic workflow adopted into standard ESCO sourcing operations; reusable agent skills and evaluation framework established for future ESCO AI use cases.

Basic Qualifications

• Earned Master's degree and a minimum of 5 years of post‑degree experience in Computational/Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, or closely related STEM quantitative field.
• 2+ years of applied technical work building AI or machine learning solutions in a programming language such as Python/R, with working knowledge of the ecosystem (NumPy, pandas, PyTorch, scikit‑learn, or related).
• 3+ years of expertise in strategic thinking, problem framing, and translating ambiguous business needs into tractable AI, modeling, or automation workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to frame ambiguous sourcing or supply‑chain business needs as tractable AI, modeling, or computational workflows.
• Skill in communicating technical recommendations with clearly stated assumptions, uncertainty, and limitations, to sourcing, procurement, and business audiences.

Additional Preferences

• Earned PhD in a relevant field and 2+ years of post‑degree experience in Computational/Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, or quantitative field.
• Experience applying AI/ML to pharmaceutical, life‑sciences, or supply‑chain/sourcing problems (prior biology or life‑sciences background not required).
• Familiarity with pharmaceutical or regulated‑industry supply chains preferred; partners closely with sourcing subject‑matter experts across ESCO to build necessary modality‑ and process‑specific context.
• Strong SQL and relational data modeling, with comfort turning large, messy, unstructured, or incomplete sourcing data into reliable, decision‑ready output.
• Hands‑on experience with cloud platforms and solid engineering practice: Git, containers, CI/CD, and experiment or run tracking.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, or structured knowledge representation for supplier, contract, or technical content.
• Fluency with agent frameworks and orchestration (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalent) and the primitives underneath them: planner/executor splits, hand‑offs, escalation logic, and state management across multi‑step or multi‑session workflows. Knowing why they fail, not just how to call them.
• End‑to‑end RAG design over messy