Senior Director, Software Engineering - Silicon Valley Hub

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 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.

Lilly’s Software Product Engineering (SPE) organization builds the platforms and products that power how Lilly discovers medicines, runs clinical trials, manufactures at scale, brings therapies to market, and supports patients across their care journey. Our portfolio spans agentic AI platforms, drug discovery tooling, connected lab and clinical systems, patient‑facing digital products, and enterprise developer infrastructure used across the company. SPE engineers ship software that is used daily by Lilly scientists, clinicians, commercial teams, and patients themselves.

We are growing our Bay Area engineering presence to be closer to the talent, partners, and pace of innovation that the region uniquely offers. As a Software Engineering Lead based in the San Francisco Bay Area, you will be a senior technical contributor and team leader working on the platforms and products at the core of SPE’s portfolio — shaping architecture, raising the engineering bar, and helping us build software that meaningfully accelerates Lilly’s mission.

As a Software Engineering Lead, you will operate as both a hands‑on senior engineer and a technical leader. You will own architecture and design for systems used across SPE, write production code on the highest‑leverage components, and lead engineering teams delivering software used across Lilly. Specifically, you will:

• Lead architecture and design across multiple platform components in the SPE portfolio, making the technical decisions that determine how our systems scale, evolve, and integrate.
• Write production code on critical platform components — including core services, SDKs, and developer‑facing APIs — and set the bar for code quality, testing, and operability across the team.
• Lead engineering teams of full‑time engineers and partner resources, providing technical direction, design review, and day‑to‑day mentorship that develops the next generation of senior engineers.
• Partner with product managers, designers, architects, and SPE leadership to translate ambiguous problems into clear technical roadmaps, with realistic delivery plans and well‑scoped milestones.
• Drive adoption of platform standards, architecture patterns, and engineering practices across SPE — including service design, API design, observability, security, and CI/CD.
• Evaluate emerging technologies — including agentic AI frameworks, LLM application patterns, and modern developer platforms — and build proofs of concept that move our roadmap forward.
• Work across SPE teams in Indianapolis, San Diego, the UK, and India, and with partners across Lilly Research Labs, Tech@Lilly, and the broader business, to ship integrated solutions.
• Bring an external perspective to internal work — staying current with how leading engineering organizations build, deploy, and operate software at scale, and applying that perspective to lift our practices.

• Deep, hands‑on expertise designing and shipping production software systems, with demonstrable examples of leading architecture and design for non‑trivial, high‑throughput, or high‑reliability platforms.
• Strong programming skills in Python and Type Script / JavaScript, with proficiency in at least one additional systems‑oriented language (Go, Rust, Java, or similar) and the judgment to choose the right tool for the problem.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems on major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including containerized workloads on Kubernetes and event‑driven or asynchronous architectures (Kafka, queues, streaming systems, or similar).
• Practical experience designing and…