Agentic AI Solutions, Associate Director

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. For nearly 150 years we have worked tirelessly to discover medicines that make life better. In Product Research and Development (PRD), we transform molecules into medicines, working through an increasingly external partner network across drug substance, drug product, and analytical services. PRD's External Supply Chain & Operations (ESCO) team stewards this external partner network — delivering supplier excellence, systematic and scalable sourcing workflows, supply chain design, technical-transfer processes, and end‑to‑end network performance across drug substance, drug product, and analytical services.

As ESCO scales a harmonized supplier governance model and moves toward AI‑enabled, agentic sourcing operations, it requires a net‑new capability: hands‑on agentic AI and applied ML expertise dedicated to building practical tools and autonomous agents for PRD's sourcing systems and business processes. This is a new position for the team, modeled on the agentic AI engineering capability DDCS has built within its Digital Transformation and Data Science team, adapted for ESCO's external‑sourcing context.

Partner with ESCO sourcing operations leads and category managers to identify, prioritize, and scope high‑value opportunities where agentic AI, machine learning, and automation can improve speed, productivity, insight generation, and decision quality across the CDMO/CMO network. Translate stakeholder needs into practical AI tools, technical designs, acceptance criteria, and delivery plans that fit real sourcing, supplier‑management, and technical‑transfer workflows. Build and deploy AI‑enabled applications, services, and workflows that integrate models, sourcing data sources, document collections, and user‑facing interfaces for decision support and workflow automation.

Create reusable agent skills, task harnesses, validators, run ledgers, and reproducibility controls that allow AI agents to execute diverse, long‑running sourcing tasks reliably (e.g., capacity assessment, RFx analysis, technical‑transfer status tracking). Build agentic knowledge extraction and question‑answering systems for structured and unstructured sourcing content, including CDMO proposals, quality/audit reports, contracts, capacity data, technical‑transfer records, and supplier scorecards. Design evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, and human‑in‑the‑loop escalation patterns so agentic outputs are auditable, traceable, and appropriate for high‑consequence sourcing and supply‑continuity decisions.

Apply knowledge graphs, data ontologies, and structured knowledge representation where they improve retrieval, traceability, and reuse across the supplier and CDMO network.

Build the PRD Supply Chain Intelligence (AI) agent end to end — from feasibility through pilot to production — as a core deliverable of this role, in coordination with Tech@Lilly and PRD Strategy's…