Software Engineer, TuneLab

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.

Lilly Catalyze
360 is a comprehensive approach to enabling the early‑stage biotech ecosystem by democratizing access to infrastructure, expertise, and resources. Through its interconnected pillars–Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, Lilly ExploR&D, and Lilly Tune Lab–Catalyze
360 strategically removes barriers that traditionally block bold science from becoming life‑changing medicines, providing biotechs with flexible combinations of capital, physical lab space, R&D capabilities, AI/ML tools, and decades of enterprise learning. Lilly Tune Lab is an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) platform that provides biotech companies access to drug discovery models trained on years of Lilly’s research data. Lilly estimates that this first release of AI models includes proprietary data obtained at a cost of over $1billion, representing one of the industry’s most valuable datasets used to train an AI system available to biotechnology companies.

By integrating advanced in silico modelling and federated learning, we connect pioneering machine learning algorithms, substantial computational power, exclusive datasets, and Lilly’s domain‑specific knowledge to drive innovation in drug discovery and facilitate access to optimal therapies for patients.

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 won’t start from zero. There are working point solutions, trained models, and internal infrastructure to build on. Federated learning is a meaningful part of the work – letting biotech customers use Lilly’s models without their data leaving their environment.

Plenty else is yours to create from scratch. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be one of the founding engineers on this team. This is an IC role with real scope. 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. There’s no tech lead above you to defer to and no architecture council to elevate to.

You’re the senior engineer in the room. You’ll work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with product, design, data science, and report to the Tune Lab Engineering Manager.

• Build the product 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.
• Lift the team Mentor other engineers as the team grows. Make them better at the job, not…