Associate Director — PR&D Delivery & Operations

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, the data and digital capability that underpins every regulatory submission, batch investigation, and process decision across CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls) is being rebuilt rather than maintained. Time-to-insight for scientists and process engineers, audit- and inspection-readiness, and the cost of running PR&D's platforms all depend on these capabilities. This role is the mechanism by which the portfolio moves from sustaining the current estate to reshaping it: from request-taking to business partnership, from manual data and process work to AI- and agent-supported execution, and from vendor dependence to retained Lilly capability. The Associate Director, PR&D Delivery & Operations leads broader delivery teams across CMC data platform modernization (structured and unstructured data, platform operations), scientific workflow automation (LIMS, MES, ELN), data governance and business alignment, and AI & Analytics (AI-use-case delivery) — accountable for delivery, technical direction, team capability and measurable business outcomes across all three. The role sits where CMC scientific and data process meets engineering: credible enough to lead a design review and challenge an architecture, fluent enough in regulated CMC data work to shape how a scientific or process team actually works. Split roughly 60% delivery and technical leadership and 40% strategy, business partnership and vendor leadership, it owns the demand relationship with PR&D business owners, directs the partner teams delivering a material share of the work, and supports the portfolio's AI and agentic capability agenda as one part of a broader delivery mandate.

Portfolio Delivery Ownership — own delivery across the portfolio — scope, schedule, quality, dependencies, release readiness and production health — for CMC data and semantic infrastructure (knowledge graph, ontology, document and structured-data ingestion), platform modernization and operations, and AI-use-case delivery, directing the broader teams accountable for each track. Run delivery on real signals: flow, predictability, defect escape and adoption by scientific and process teams, not status reporting. Technical Direction & Engineering Standards — set and defend the technical direction of the portfolio, contributing to how CMC data platforms support the goals of the wider PR&D business area; review architecture and design, challenge weak decisions, and own standards for APIs, data contracts, ontology and knowledge-graph modeling (RDF/OWL/SPARQL, property graphs), and tool-calling interfaces (MCP) across CMC data platforms. Raise the engineering bar on test automation, CI/CD, observability and the deliberate reduction of technical debt, staying close enough to the work to judge trade-offs credibly. AI & Agentic Delivery Support — support delivery of AI and agentic use cases already on the portfolio roadmap — document and schema intelligence, retrieval over CMC content, and knowledge-graph-powered Q&A or summarization agents — ensuring these initiatives get the same delivery rigor, resourcing and release discipline as any other workstream. Help the team bring new use cases forward for evaluation, and support them through validation and into production with appropriate guardrails and human-in-the-loop