Principal AI/ML Engineer – Market Access

Eli Lilly and Company; Indianapolis (IN); On-site; USD 69,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company bonus

401(k)

Healthcare benefits

Job summary

Eli Lilly and Company is seeking a Principal AI/ML Engineer to design and build the engineering backbone for AI/ML systems supporting employer data, benefits administration, and partner integrations. You will collaborate with data scientists and cross‑functional teams to productionize models, orchestration frameworks, and scalable pipelines.

Primary responsibilities include deploying agentic AI platforms, building data pipelines, and ensuring secure, auditable systems in a regulated environment,

Qualifications

• Master’s or Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative/technical field with production AI/ML experience.
• Strong Python and software engineering practices; production-grade systems.
• Experience with data pipelines, data engineering, and secure, auditable systems.
• Familiarity with cloud and tooling (Databricks, AWS/Azure) and CI/CD)

Responsibilities

• Design and build AI/ML engineering backbones and agentic platforms for production.
• Develop end-to-end AI/ML pipelines from data ingestion to deployment and monitoring.
• Collaborate with data scientists to productionize prototypes and scale solutions.
• Ensure governance, HIPAA/PHI handling, and data-residency considerations.

Skills

Python proficiency

Data engineering

Software engineering practices

Communication

Education

Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Data Science/Math/Statistics

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Data Science/Math/Statistics

Tools

Databricks

AWS

Azure

Containers (Docker)

Git

CI/CD

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.

What You’ll Be Doing

As a Principal AI/ML Engineer, you will design and build the engineering backbone for the AI and ML systems that serve the Lilly Employer Organization: the orchestration frameworks, end-to-end data and model pipelines, serving infrastructure, and the evaluation and monitoring that keep them reliable in production. You will work at the intersection of employer data, benefit administration, field operations, and third‑party partner integrations. You will partner closely with data scientists to productionize models and agentic workflows. You will also work with the Employer Technical Product Manager, employer field teams, and Tech@Lilly colleagues to bring those solutions into real applications in a secure and auditable way. You will reuse infrastructure and patterns so that each new employer workflow is faster and cheaper to ship.

How You’ll Succeed

• Build and operationalize agentic AI platforms, including agent-to-agent orchestration frameworks, multi‑agent workflow engines, tool and API integration layers, and secure connectivity between agents, enterprise systems, and external partner platforms.
• Build and integrate employer data pipelines, bringing data from employers, benefit administrators, and third‑party partners into secure, analytics‑ready platforms.
• Deliver AI capabilities for employer use cases, such as employer reporting, predictive analytics, benefit optimization, and decision support for employer field teams.
• Engineer robust, end-to-end AI/ML pipelines, covering data capture, feature engineering, training, fine‑tuning, inference, and feedback, at production scale and reliability.
• Stand up ML engineering foundations, including model and prompt versioning, registries, experiment tracking, continuous integration and delivery for models, and automated evaluation and rollback within each pipeline.
• Apply production‑grade deployment techniques, including scalable model serving, containerization, inference optimization, and deployment of small and specialized models hosted in‑house, with attention to latency, cost, scalability, and data residency.
• Build observability and monitoring for AI systems, including tracing of agentic workflows, cost and latency tracking, drift detection, and integration of AI evaluation into production monitoring.
• Implement governance and data‑protection controls, including HIPAA compliance, PHI and PII handling, de‑identification, and auditability consistent with a regulated environment.
• Design reusable, horizontal engineering capabilities and shared infrastructure that multiple teams and use cases can build on, rather than one‑off deployments.
• Partner with data scientists to productionize prototypes and harden them for scale, reliability, and maintainability.
• Communicate clearly with technical and non‑technical stakeholders and stay current with emerging agentic and ML engineering tooling.
• Manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously.

What You Should Bring

• Foundational knowledge in communication, leadership, teamwork, problem solving, solution and blueprint definition, business acumen, architectural processes (e.g., blueprinting, reference architecture, governance), technical standards, project delivery, and the industry.

Business Analysis And Technical Leadership, Including

• Engaging with the business and proactively seeking opportunities to deliver business value.
• Understanding business requirements and effectively translating business needs and processes into technical terms, and vice versa.
• Eliciting and defining requirements.
• Ensuring appropriate business roles are engaged in solution execution.
• Participating in design reviews to ensure traceability of requirements.
• Networking with appropriate Tech@Lilly colleagues to determine solutions that meet business partners’ needs.
• Seeking opportunities to reuse existing processes and services to streamline support and implementation of key systems.
• Staying abreast of tools and technologies to influence Tech@Lilly strategy so that it provides the best usage opportunities for the business.

Basic Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or another quantitative or technical field, and 2 + years of experience developing, deploying, or maintaining AI, machine learning, or data systems in production environments.
• OR Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or another quantitative or technical field, and 4 + years of experience developing, deploying, or maintaining AI, machine learning, or data systems in production environments.
• Qualified applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a full‑time basis. Lilly will not provide support for or sponsor work authorization or visas for this role, including but not limited to F-1 CPT, F-1 OPT, F-1 STEM OPT, J-1, H-1B, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, or L-1.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Python and sound software‑engineering practices, including version control, testing, and code review.
• Experience building and deploying data or ML systems in production.
• Agentic platforms: experience engineering agent-to-agent orchestration and multi‑agent workflow frameworks with modern tooling (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, or equivalent), including tool and API integration and secure agent connectivity.
• End-to-end ML engineering: experience with model and prompt versioning, registries, experiment tracking, continuous integration and delivery for models, automated evaluation in pipelines, and observability for AI systems.
• Production deployment: experience with scalable model serving, containerization, inference optimization, and deployment and serving of large models and small, specialized models, plus fine‑tuning and distillation pipelines.
• Data engineering: experience building scalable data pipelines, SQL and NoSQL data stores, distributed processing, vector databases, and retrieval systems.
• Cloud and tooling: experience with AWS or Azure, Databricks, containers, Git, and CI/CD automation.
• Governance: experience with secure, auditable systems, PHI and PII handling, and data‑residency constraints.
• Partner integrations: experience integrating data and services from external partners, such as benefit administrators or health platforms, through APIs and secure data exchange.
• Domain: understanding of U.S. employer healthcare, including employer-sponsored benefits, benefit design, payers, PBMs, and access models. Experience in healthcare or pharma is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver reliable systems in complex data domains and to communicate with a geographically dispersed group of business and technical colleagues.

About The Organization

Lilly IT builds and maintains capabilities with cutting‑edge technologies, as the most prominent tech companies do. Lilly IT is different because we use technology to advance our purpose: creating medicines that make life better for people around the world. Examples include data‑driven drug discovery, connected clinical trials, and AI that helps patients access and afford their medicines. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver innovative solutions in every area of our business.

The Lilly USA Tech@Lilly team is at the forefront of leveraging data and technology to launch new medicines to market, raise awareness, and help appropriate patients get access to medication. We partner closely with Lilly's market access organization, which works with payers, employers, and government customers to improve affordability and broaden access. With a deep technical and business understanding, working across all therapeutic areas and disease states, we design and implement digital solutions to power our business. We use real‑world evidence and health outcomes data to reduce friction across the patient journey, create best‑in‑class customer engagements, improve patient outcomes, and deliver business results.

Additional Information

• Travel: 0–10%

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 $69,000 - $165,000. 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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