About this role
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. Principal Digital Solutions Engineer About Lilly 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. Manufacturing & Quality Technical Hub, Hyderabad Lilly's Hyderabad hub is a first-of-its-kind technical center built to lead the manufacturing and quality science agenda for Lilly's global supply network, and the work done here reaches patients in more than 110 countries. This hub oversees contract manufacturing of starting materials and intermediates for API manufacturing in India, managing the full scientific agenda for manufacturing and quality.
We're building a cutting-edge scientific organization and looking for top talent in process engineering, chemistry, analytical and data sciences to be part of it. The science you develop here doesn't stay here. It moves through Lilly's global supply network and reaches patients across more than 110 countries who are counting on it.
Digital Manufacturing Engineering (DME) is part of the Corporate Engineering Tech Center (ETC). The ETC is a technical resource for training, standards, project implementation, and the center of engineering excellence for the corporation, providing deeply technical resources to solve the most intractable technical problems in manufacturing. DME provides Digital Engineering Platform ownership, OT data integration solutions, engineering data standardization/ownership, and digital manufacturing solutions for Lilly Manufacturing.
Our team focuses on connecting our facilities (securely) and leveraging the data from those facilities to deliver digital manufacturing solutions to improve manufacturing productivity, data integrity / compliance, quality, and operational excellence. Digital Manufacturing Technologies include digital twins, computational modeling, edge/IoT, and analytics solutions. Digital Engineering Platforms include CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), GECMS (Global Engineering Content Management System) and many other digital platforms leveraged by engineers across Lilly Manufacturing.
Position Description and Responsibilities The Principal Digital Solutions Engineer will design, develop, support, and continuously enhance digital solutions across Lilly's global manufacturing network, while serving as the owner for one or more digital products developed by the DME team. Representative solutions in scope span the four pillars of the Engineering Digital Strategy and include — but are not limited to — the Intralogistics Monitor (ILM), Audit Trail solutions, Condition-Based Maintenance solutions, RCA and troubleshooting solutions, equipment health and predictive maintenance dashboards, capital project and qualification workflow tools, engineering knowledge search, and inspection-readiness data products. These solutions are developed on standard Digital Engineering Platforms supported by the DME team, and the engineer will partner with data leads to ensure the necessary IT, OT, and ET data is available to support each solution.
The engineer is also expected to leverage AI tools and platforms — such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, and Anthropic's Claude — to accelerate development and to embed AI capability into solutions, including building agent skills, prompt-based workflows, and retrieval/automation patterns on top of existing Lilly-approved AI platforms. This role is not focused on training or developing foundation models; it is focused on applying AI tools effectively and responsibly to manufacturing problems. This is a global role, supporting functional initiatives and all Lilly Manufacturing sites globally.
This role operates within an evolved Digital Solutions Engineering operating model. The team includes a Rapid Innovation branch that works at speed to prototype concepts and proof-of-value solutions against key business problems surfaced from the manufacturing network. The Principal Digital Solutions Engineer takes ownership of those solutions once they have been validated as worth scaling — maturing them from prototype to production-grade, hardening them for validated-system and data-integrity requirements, deploying and supporting them across sites, and providing long-term ownership over their roadmap, enhancement, and lifecycle.
This split lets the Rapid Innovation branch stay focused on speed and discovery while the Principal Digital Solutions Engineer ensures that the most valuable concepts become durable, well-supported solutions that scale across the global manufacturing network. The primary focus of the role is twofold. First, to develop and continuously enhance high-quality digital solutions that deliver measurable value to manufacturing operations — improving productivity, data integrity and compliance, quality, and operational excellence.
Second, to assume the role of owner for those solutions: defining the product roadmap, managing the backlog, owning the technical architecture and lifecycle, ensuring compliance with validated-system requirements, and providing direct technical support to global users across Lilly Manufacturing. The engineer will work under guidance of the Digital Program Lead and partner closely with site engineers, network engineering organizations, and IT/OT platform owners to ensure each solution remains fit-for-purpose as the network and the underlying technology landscape evolve. Key Objectives/Deliverables Develop and continuously enhance digital solutions in support of the Engineering Digital Strategy for Manufacturing and Quality across its four pillars: Asset Delivery & Qualification, Asset Performance/Maintenance & Reliability, Engineering Fundamentals, and Training & Knowledge Management.
Build and own solutions across a broad portfolio that may include: the Intralogistics Monitor (ILM), Audit Trail solutions, Condition-Based Maintenance solutions, equipment health and predictive maintenance dashboards, RCA and troubleshooting tools, capital project and equipment qualification workflow tools, engineering knowledge search, change-management assistants, and inspection-readiness data products. Serve as owner for one or more DME-developed digital products, including ownership of the product roadmap, backlog, technical architecture, and full lifecycle from build through sustained operation. Partner with the Rapid Innovation branch of the Digital Solutions Engineering team to take in validated prototypes and proof-of-value solutions, then mature them into production-grade, validated, scalable solutions ready for global deployment.
Lead the deployment of solutions across Lilly Manufacturing sites — including site onboarding, configuration, change management, training, and stand-up of ongoing support. Provide direct technical support for owned solutions across the global manufacturing network — triaging issues, performing root cause analysis, delivering fixes, and managing the change and release process to keep solutions reliable and validated. Drive continuous enhancement of solutions in production, prioritizing improvements based on user feedback, operational data, evolving site needs, and emerging technology capabilities.
Leverage AI tools and platforms — such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, and Anthropic's Claude — to accelerate solution development, automate routine engineering tasks, and embed AI capability into DME solutions. This includes building agent skills, prompts, retrieval-augmented patterns, and automated workflows on top of existing Lilly-approved AI platforms; it does not include training or developing foundation models. Evaluate emerging AI tools and patterns and integrate them responsibly into DME solutions, in alignment with Lilly's AI governance, data integrity, and validated-system requirements.
Write, review, and maintain production-quality Python code that powers DME digital solutions; establish and uphold development standards, code review practices, and version control discipline. Build analytics, monitoring, and visualization capabilities using Seeq and Power BI to surface manufacturing insights to engineers, operators, and leadership. Partner with data leads within DME to define and provide the IT, OT, and ET data requirements needed to support each solution, and ensure data flows are reliable, governed, and fit-for-purpose.
Ensure all solutions are designed, operated, and enhanced in accordance with validated-system, data-integrity, and GMP requirements, and develop and implement the associated technical requirements and documentation. Develop proof-of-concept solutions to explore new concepts within the Engineering Digital Strategy and progress them toward production-grade deployments. Ensure solutions focus on value generation and demonstrate measurable impact on manufacturing capacity, resilience, compliance, and operational excellence.
Basic Qualifications Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Computer/Software Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related engineering/science field. Minimum 3 years manufacturing experience. Demonstrated software development experience, with a strong working knowledge of Python.
Knowledge of manufacturing datasets and experience accessing and using IT, OT, and ET data sources. Experience leveraging data to solve problems within a manufacturing environment. Experience working with validated systems.
Experience in pharma or GMP industry. Additional Skills/Preferences Hands-on experience building solutions in Seeq (advanced analytics, asset framework, monitoring) and Power BI (data modeling, DAX, dashboards). Experience acting as an owner or product owner for a production digital solution, including roadmap, backlog, technical support, and lifecycle ownership.
Demonstrated experience providing ongoing technical support and continuous enhancement of digital solutions in a production environment. Experience leveraging AI tools and platforms (e.g., Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, Claude, or similar) to accelerate development and to build agent skills, prompts, and automated workflows. Experience training or developing foundation models is not required.
Familiarity with industrial data sources and protocols (e.g., Aveva PI, OPC UA, MQTT, historian/SCADA systems) and with enterprise data platforms (e.g., Databricks, SQL/relational data stores). Experience with one or more of the example solution domains: intralogistics monitoring, audit trail/data-integrity tooling, condition-based maintenance, equipment health monitoring, RCA/troubleshooting, equipment qualification, capital project workflows, or engineering knowledge management. Familiarity with modern software engineering practices: source control (Git/Azure DevOps), CI/CD, automated testing, and code review.
Strong technical writing and communication skills; ability to translate between manufacturing engineers, IT/OT teams, and software developers. Ability to work well across different cultures and global manufacturing sites. At Lilly, caring is not only what we do for patients.
It is how we work. We believe the people who dedicate themselves to making medicines better deserve an environment that makes their lives better too, one where they are supported, respected, and given the space to do their best work. This is not just a policy.
It is who we are. Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form ( https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation ) for further assistance.
Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response. Lilly does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. #WeAreLilly