Director​/Senior Director – Cheminformatics and Applied AI

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.

At Lilly, we serve an extraordinary purpose. We make a difference for people around the globe by discovering, developing, and delivering medicines that help them live longer, healthier, more active lives. Not only do we deliver breakthrough medications, but you also can count on us to develop creative solutions to support communities through philanthropy and volunteerism.

Lilly’s Early Molecule Discovery (EMD) mission is to identify hits and deliver optimized Leads that advance though Advanced Molecule Design (AMD) into quality drug candidates and, ultimately, breakthrough medicines.

Portfolio Impact:
Scientific leadership through direct technical credibility

• Serve as a recognized expert in cheminformatics and applied AI/ML, who consistently delivers high-impact scientific contributions and strategies that resolve critical project challenges to advances programs through major milestones.
• Develop and apply cheminformatics, statistical, and AI/ML methods that improve hit identification and hit-to-lead across screening technologies, e.g., DNA-encoded library (DEL), high-throughput screening (HTS), virtual screening (VS), fragment-, and affinity-based approaches, and across modalities, e.g., small molecule, macrocyclic peptide, and molecular glues.
• Drive the analytical and machine learning methodology development and applications for the DEL platform: enrichment analysis and denoising of selection data, models trained on DEL output, and their extension to VS of ultra-large synthesizable chemical space.
• Identify hard scientific problems limiting program progress and take personal ownership of driving solutions through rigorous and creative scientific thinking.
• Stay current with external scientific advances, emerging methodologies, techniques, and enabling technologies and rapidly evaluate, adapt, and deploy those most relevant for advancing program objectives.

• Partner with Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics leadership to define platform-level strategy, resource investments, and organizational priorities for Cheminformatics and Applied AI.
• Encourage close collaborations and initiatives with computational chemistry, medicinal chemists, Ligand-, Biophysics and Chemical Biology cross pillar colleagues and other cross function partners such as ADME, that culminate in the generation of well poised analysis, robust models and testable hypotheses.
• Serve as a scientific advisor to senior leadership across discovery, therapeutic areas, and technical functions; provide expert guidance across multiple programs; influence portfolio-level decisions through authoritative scientific judgment.
• Identify and contribute to external innovation opportunities that enhance our ability to deliver quality differentiated hits and leads.
• Build and leverage external scientific networks e.g. academic collaborators, CROs, technology vendors, professional societies, to access groundbreaking scientific expertise and capabilities.
• Cultivate cross function collaborations with Discovery &…