Senior Director, Software Engineering - Silicon Valley Hub

What You’ll Be Doing

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.

• 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 building APIs and SDKs that other engineers depend on — REST, GraphQL, gRPC — with a strong sense for developer experience, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Working fluency with the modern AI application stack — LLM APIs, retrieval and embeddings, evaluation, and ideally agentic patterns such as MCP, tool use, and orchestration frameworks.
• Solid grounding in data modeling and storage — SQL relational databases, plus working experience with at least one of: vector stores, document stores, search infrastructure, or analytical data platforms.
• Strong instincts for security, identity, and access — including OAuth/OIDC patterns, identity providers (Okta or similar), and the operational realities of running services in a regulated enterprise.
• Experience leading or significantly influencing engineering teams — through technical leadership, mentorship, design review, and the day‑to‑day work of raising a team's quality bar.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make complex technical tradeoffs clear to engineering peers, product partners, and senior leadership.
• High intellectual curiosity, strong external perspective, and a genuine interest in the problem space — building software that helps Lilly bring medicines to patients faster.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated experience leading architecture, design, and delivery of production systems.
• Technical experience with multiple programming languages, including at least Python and…