Sr. Director- Software Engineering Manager

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

Job summary

Eli Lilly and Company, headquartered in Indianapolis, seeks a Software Engineering Manager to lead one or more domains within our SPE organization. You will set the multi-year technical direction, align with UX, product, and regulatory partners, and shape the next generation of patient-focused software solutions.

You will own roadmaps, manage headcount and budgets, drive architectural decisions, and mentor the next generation of technical leaders in a fast-paced, regulated healthcare environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 8+ years in software engineering.
• 5+ years as a software engineering manager.
• Experience owning technical strategy and delivery roadmaps.
• Experience with web and cloud technologies.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering teams across domains, setting multi-year technical direction.
• Own architecture, platforms, and outcomes for initiatives.
• Define roadmaps, headcount, budget, and partner sourcing.
• Improve processes, quality, and productivity across teams.
• Ensure health, security, and regulatory compliance of domains.

Skills

Leadership

Technical depth

Cross-functional

Communication

AI/ML awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Node.js

Vue.js

Python

Java

Scala

Go

Rust

RESTful APIs

Microservices

Spark

Hadoop

AWS

Azure

Job description

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our 35,000 employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We're looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

Come develop great software solutions to solve exciting problems to help patients!

The Software Product Engineering organization is actively looking for a Software Engineering Manager. Are you determined to deliver the best user-centered solutions? Are you ready to own the technical strategy for one or more domains and shape the next generation of application development at Lilly?

What You’ll Be Doing

As the leader of an engineering team accountable for one or more domains, or bounded contexts, within our Commercial or Clinical portfolio, you will set the multi-year technical direction for those domains and use the best of what modern web technologies and architecture have to offer, to design solutions that transform patient experiences and improve treatment outcomes. These products will meet patients where they are due to your close collaboration with our user-experience, product, business, medical, and regulatory partners. You will define the engineering standards, platform investments, and ways of working that extend beyond your own team, and you will partner with business and technology leaders to translate portfolio strategy into a funded, staffed engineering roadmap that is responsive to both business and patient needs. You will also ready your domains for an agentic future: raising the team’s fluency with AI-assisted engineering, designing systems and data so that well-governed APIs, tools, and context are available for agents to act on safely, and making deliberate, evidence-based choices about where AI and agentic capabilities create real value for the business and for patients rather than novelty.

How You’ll Succeed:

• As a Software Engineering Manager, you will bring both your leadership and technical depth to set direction for the applications and platform capabilities across your domains that exceed product goals and transform the ecosystem.
• Leveraging your strong background in software engineering to guide the team’s work, resolve the most ambiguous and technically complex problems, and own technology and architecture direction for the products and platforms in your domains, including build-versus-buy, platform consolidation, and technical-debt investment decisions that play out over multiple planning cycles.
• Owning a multi-year technical roadmap for your domains: sequencing platform investment against business outcomes, quantifying the trade-offs, and defending that plan in annual planning and funding cycles.
• By maximizing the potential of your team, providing guidance, mentorship and growth opportunities, deepening the technical capability of the team, and deliberately developing the next generation of technical leads and people managers, while fostering a collaborative work environment that promotes innovation.
• Matching unique product needs to the resources and skills within your team, while owning headcount planning, budget, and vendor and partner sourcing for your domains, and forecasting capacity several quarters ahead against a demand pipeline you help shape.
• Driving process change beyond your own team, continuously evaluating and enhancing software engineering processes, methodologies, and tools to improve efficiency, quality, and productivity, and establishing the engineering standards and metrics that peer teams adopt.
• Owning the operational health of your domains — service levels, reliability, incident response, security posture, and adherence to data privacy and regulatory requirements — and making the investment case when that health needs attention.
• As a superb communicator and influencer with strong interpersonal skills, you will work and collaborate effectively with your team and product stakeholders, and build alignment across engineering, product, design, and business leadership, representing engineering at the Director and Executive Director level.
• Setting clear objectives, scope and schedules, ensuring the team understands of expectations and priorities, and making transparent, well-reasoned trade-offs when strategy, capacity, and timelines conflict.
• Owning the hiring bar and talent strategy for your domains: attracting strong technical talent, building succession depth for critical roles, and managing performance with candor.

Your Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical engineering discipline, including Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, Information Science, Network Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Information Systems (CIS), Management Information Systems (MIS), Cloud Computing, Data Science
• 8+ years working in software engineering roles
• 5+years of experience as a software engineering manager
• Demonstrated experience owning technical strategy and delivery roadmaps for one or more domains, driving execution and outcomes across multiple planning cycles.
• Experience with web and cloud technologies

What You Should Bring:

• Master's degree preferred
• Experience leading multiple concurrent, complex engineering programs from inception to production, including modernizing or retiring legacy systems along the way.
• Deep professional work experience in software engineering, building customer facing applications using Node.js, Vue.js, Python, Java, Scala, Go or Rust.
• Depth across full-stack and platform engineering — RESTful APIs, microservice and event-driven architectures, distributed data management, observability, DevOps and CI/CD, and public cloud (AWS or Azure) — with the judgment to choose among these for a given problem and own the consequences of that choice over the life of the system.
• A strong ability to architect and design robust, high-scale systems and to challenge engineers to think bigger and more generically in developing their solutions, and to make and document durable architectural decisions that other teams build on.
• Demonstrated ability to scope, schedule and resource multiple complex programs in collaboration with cross functional partners and external delivery partners.
• Demonstrated ability to translate business or portfolio strategy into an engineering roadmap, and to communicate that roadmap credibly to senior leadership.
• Self-motivated, independent, and proactive, with outstanding communication skills. Can effectively communicate complex ideas and make compelling arguments, and influence outcomes without formal authority.
• Excellent cross-functional influencer with experience working in a fast-paced environment with frequent context switching, including sustained engagement with senior stakeholders.
• A working understanding of core concepts related to Machine Learning/AI and Data Engineering, and a clear point of view on where they create leverage in your domains.
• Distributed data storage and processing framework experience (Spark and Hadoop).
• Experience growing and maturing software engineering teams and technical leaders, including coaching tech leads and emerging managers, to efficiently deliver high quality software products.
• Experience operating in a regulated environment (healthcare, life sciences, or financial services), with working knowledge of data privacy, security, and quality or compliance expectations for sensitive personal data.

About the Organization

Lilly IT builds and maintains capabilities using groundbreaking technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Lilly IT is that we create new possibilities through tech to advance our purpose – creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. 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.

Lilly's Software Product Engineering (SPE) organization is focused on building core foundational software platforms to accelerate our ability to reach and support patients digitally. This organization is powered by software engineering experts that solve challenging problems around patient engagement and drug discovery with code.