Senior Director, Data Operations Lead

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.

Purpose:

The Senior Director, RWD Operations Lead drives the strategy, execution, innovation, and continuous improvement of Lilly's real‑world data ecosystem across therapeutic areas and enterprise data assets. This role ensures that RWD pipelines and processes are built, validated, and governed so that raw RWD is systematically evaluated, transformed, standardized, operationalized, and governed into reusable, AI‑ready assets that accelerate evidence generation at scale.

Equally this leader will translate the strategic direction and execution at the ground level, bringing deep, hands‑on RWD expertise to ensure that scientific requirements are faithfully reflected in infrastructure design and data engineering decisions — bridging the gap between research intent and technical build. This includes oversight of the construction of analytic datasets, ensuring, in collaboration with HEOR and related functions, they are built to specification, reproducible, and fit for regulatory‑grade and publication‑quality evidence generation.

This leader orchestrates cross‑functional governance, establishes the logical rules and frameworks for appropriate data use, and extends the vision for RWD value beyond HEOR to maximize enterprise‑wide impact. Responsibilities also includes support of knowledge management including, but not limited to, ownership of code list and algorithm creation and maintenance, ensuring a single source of truth of resources and a repository for said information that enables high‑quality, reproducible, and efficient evidence generation across Lilly's data portfolio.

Critically, this role continuously scans for and incorporates emerging innovations— translating new capabilities into practical improvements that elevate the quality, speed, and scalability of Lilly's RWD operations.

The role sits at the core of the RWDARS transformation workstream, supporting future‑state team structure, operational governance, and execution excellence.

• Lead the technical and data integrity evaluation of raw RWD prior to acceptance and licensing, ensuring fitness‑for‑use, completeness, standardization, structure, and alignment with enterprise needs; ensuring all documentation is sufficient and centralized.
• Collaborate closely with RWD architect(s) and engineer(s) to translate scientific needs and intent into enterprise RWD infrastructure strategy and specifications, resolving pipeline bottlenecks and ensuring documentation meets operational standards (SAPs, data dictionaries, audit trails).
• Accelerate evidence generation by standardizing and transforming raw data into reusable, analysis‑ready assets across different business units.
• Develop, execute, and document quality‑control frameworks that qualify data completeness and ensure consistent, reliable RWD operations at scale.
• Lead with a forward‑thinking mindset to incorporate strategic innovation (AI) into RWD ecosystem operations.

• Own end‑to‑end code list standardization, maintenance, stewardship, and hosting (e.g. ontology specifications, procedure codes, and medication codes incl. ICD‑10‑CM, ICD-9, SNOMED‑CT, NDC, CPT/HCPC, LOINC, RxNorm).
• Lead development and maintenance of reusable phenotyping algorithms, code libraries, and standardized data pipelines and modular code to accelerate study startup.
• Establish governance and documentation standards for RWD asset reuse across functions.