Lead AI Engineer for Drug Discovery Deployment

BioSpace; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 266,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan

Pension

Vacation benefits

Medical benefits

Flexible benefits

Life insurance

Job summary

Lilly is advancing an AI foundation for drug discovery. This Forward Deployed AI Engineer role embeds with biology teams to translate scientific constraints into scalable production systems, using LLMs, RAG, and AI frameworks to accelerate discovery.

You will deploy end‑to‑end workflows with measurable impact across therapeutic areas. You will work with biologists and computational scientists on multi‑omics data, with a focus on rapid iteration, evaluation benchmarks, and reusable platform

Qualifications

• PhD in computational biology, bioinformatics, data science, computer science, or a related field, with 3+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment experience; or equivalent demonstrated experience building and deploying AI/ML tools for scientific applications in biotech, pharma, or scientific software
• Experience building and deploying AI/ML tools for scientific applications in biotech, pharma, or scientific software
• Strong programming skills in Python and familiarity with the modern AI/ML ecosystem, including LLMs (API usage, prompt engineering, fine‑tuning), and frameworks (PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain/LlamaIndex)

Responsibilities

• Embed with computational biology and disease biology teams to understand workflows, data, tools, and bottlenecks
• Translate use-cases into concrete prototypes with evaluation benchmarks and clear success criteria
• Design and ship production systems quickly, owning integrations, data provenance, reliability, and on‑call readiness
• Apply LLM, retrieval‑augmented generation, text‑to‑SQL, and agentic AI frameworks to drug discovery challenges
• Run evaluation loops to measure model quality and drive product decisions
• Distill deployment learnings into reusable primitives, reference architectures, and validation templates
• Collaborate with AI/LLMOps engineers to feed field-tested solutions back into the platform
• Promote a culture of experimentation, speed, and evidence‑based impact within AI4D and Lilly LR Research

Skills

Python

LLMs

PyTorch

LangChain

AWS

Git

Multi-omics

Data dashboards

Open source

AI deployments

Education

PhD in computational biology

MS in computational biology

Tools

HuggingFace

Job description

Lilly is advancing an AI foundation for drug discovery. This Forward Deployed AI Engineer role embeds with biology teams to translate scientific constraints into scalable production systems, using LLMs, RAG, and AI frameworks to accelerate discovery.

You will deploy end‑to‑end workflows with measurable impact across therapeutic areas. You will work with biologists and computational scientists on multi‑omics data, with a focus on rapid iteration, evaluation benchmarks, and reusable platform