Software Engineer, TuneLab

Job Summary:

Tune Lab has powerful underlying AI models and point solutions. The job now is to turn them into something a biotech startup can actually use: a coherent workflow, a clean product experience, and a SaaS offering that scales. You’ll own product end‑to‑end, set the technical direction, and make the architecture calls that decide how fast a small team can move.

• Own product surfaces end‑to‑end—frontend, backend, data, integrations—whatever the problem requires. You don’t hand off; you ship.
• Architect and build the application layer that wraps Lilly’s AI models into reliable, cohesive workflows for biotech customers. Make a set of point solutions feel like a product.
• Make pragmatic technology decisions. Optimize for speed and quality. Pick boring tools when they work and reach for novel only when it pays.
• Stay deep in the code. This is a build role, not a review role.
• Set the engineering bar from scratch—code review, testing, release process, on‑call. What you build becomes the team norm.

• Mentor other engineers as the team grows. Make them better at the job, not just better at this codebase.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager on hiring. You’re an interviewer and a recruiter—sell the role and hold the bar.
• Pressure‑test the roadmap with the PM and design lead. You have product taste and you use it. You’ll push back when a spec is wrong and find the simpler way to ship.
• Spot the things nobody owns and either pick them up or assign them clearly. The team’s gaps are your problem.

• Navigate enterprise infrastructure, security, and compliance requirements without disrupting development progress.
• Work with Lilly IT and internal platform teams to leverage existing capabilities rather than rebuild them.
• Represent engineering in conversations with external biotech partners when it matters. You can speak credibly to a CTO on the other side.

• Education:
  
  Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping SaaS products used by real customers.
• Demonstrated experience operating as a senior or staff IC on a small team—not just as a senior IC on a large one.
• 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.

• Strong full‑stack fundamentals. You’re comfortable owning a feature from database schema to UI and have an opinion about each layer.
• Solid API design and integration experience. You know how to build systems that connect things cleanly.
• Real frontend craft: you can design and ship interfaces that feel right, not just functional. You sweat the empty states and the error states.
• Cloud experience and comfort with modern deployment practices.
• Enough familiarity with AI/ML to make good integration decisions. You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you need to understand what you’re wrapping and why it matters.
• Always learning. You want the why behind an ask, not just the what, and you don’t let momentum decide a solution for you.
• Hands‑on experience building LLM‑powered features. You understand the practical challenges: reliability, evals, context management, and when not to use AI.
• Comfortable with AI‑assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.). You know how to get the most out of them.

• You think about the user, not just the system. You’ve built software that external customers actually paid for and relied on.
• You’ve simplified complex backend capabilities into clean, usable product experiences.
• You ask “what problem are we solving?” before “how do we build it?”
• You can hold your own with a PM on what we should build, not just how to build it.
• Focused on delivering business value, not just shipping features. You’ll work directly with internal stakeholders and customers when it helps the team.

• You’ve worked in environments where the…