Senior Principal SRE Engineer – Reliability Strategy

Eli Lilly and Company; Indianapolis (IN); On-site; USD 129,000 - 231,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan

Health benefits

Well-being benefits

Job summary

Lilly is seeking a Senior Principal SRE Engineering Lead to own reliability across a multi-application production estate. You will define SLOs, drive error-budget governance, and set observability standards while leading high-severity incident responses.

This role emphasizes engineering judgment, durable production changes, and mentorship of senior ICs in a regulated environment. You will collaborate with Reliability Leaders, agents, and architects to scale reliability and deliver secure,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical engineering discipline.
• 7+ years of progressive engineering experience, with at least 6 years as a Site Reliability Engineer or Production Engineer.
• Hands-on experience authoring and validating runbooks for real remediation procedures.
• Experience designing self-healing patterns and validated production reliability in regulated environments.
• Ownership of an SLO/SLI framework and error-budget policy across a multi-application estate.
• Experience leading high-severity incident response as incident commander and conducting blameless postmortems.

Responsibilities

• Be the senior reliability authority for your area and drive sustainable reliability improvements.
• Lead SLO governance and error-budget burn-rate discussions with product owners.
• Define observability standards and enforce deployment safety and IaC practices.
• Coach and mentor senior engineers and contribute to enterprise reliability practices.
• Lead high-severity incident response and translate findings into durable engineering work.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including product, platform, and agentic automation groups.

Skills

Runbooks design

SRE platform design

Observability expertise

Incident commander

Leadership without authority

Regulated environment

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT or related

Tools

Splunk

Datadog

New Relic

Grafana/Prometheus

Job description

Lilly is seeking a Senior Principal SRE Engineering Lead to own reliability across a multi-application production estate. You will define SLOs, drive error-budget governance, and set observability standards while leading high-severity incident responses.

This role emphasizes engineering judgment, durable production changes, and mentorship of senior ICs in a regulated environment. You will collaborate with Reliability Leaders, agents, and architects to scale reliability and deliver secure,