Associate Director - Software Product Engineering Operations Leader

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.

We are seeking an Associate Director of Software Product Engineering Operations Leader to drive operational excellence across our SPE software engineering platforms and services. The ideal candidate will lead high-performing teams responsible for ensuring software reliability, availability, and performance while championing cloud transformation initiatives and modern software product engineering practices.

Impact You'll Make

As our Software Product Engineering Operations Leader, you'll be responsible for ensuring the reliability and performance of software platforms serving millions of users and processing billions in transaction volume. Your leadership will directly impact software quality, customer satisfaction, engineering efficiency, and the organization's ability to deliver innovative digital solutions at scale.

What You'll Be Doing
Leadership & Team Management

• Build, mentor, and lead global software engineering operations teams across multiple locations, balancing internal staff and vendor partnerships
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and operational excellence in software development
• Drive performance management and professional development for software engineering team members

Software Product Engineering Operations

• Oversee mission-critical software environments supporting all aspects of supporting our patients, platforms, etc.
• Establish and maintain robust software release management, deployment, and quality assurance processes
• Implement Software Product Engineering Readiness Certification Programs to ensure quality and stability before go-live
• Develop and track engineering KPIs (MTTR, SLA compliance, CSAT) to drive continuous product improvement

Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering

• Lead platform-native software engineering strategies across Lilly's internal platforms
• Drive application architecture improvements and software performance optimization initiatives
• Partner with development teams to implement infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and automation for software delivery

Software Monitoring & Observability

• Direct comprehensive software monitoring and observability strategy across PLGJ
• Ensure end-to-end visibility of software applications, microservices, and customer experience
• Implement proactive alerting and automated remediation capabilities for software products

Stakeholder Management

• Develop and maintain strong cross-functional partnerships with product, design, and business teams
• Provide transparent communications and reporting on operational performance and roadmap progress

Process Improvement & Engineering Transformation

• Implement DevOps practices to improve collaboration between development, QA, and operations

What You Should Bring

• MBA or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline
• Experience in large scale processing software environments
• Background in Agile methodologies (SAFe, Scrum)
• Knowledge of enterprise software performance management tools and techniques
• Proven track record managing enterprise-scale, mission-critical software applications
• Strong background in implementing monitoring and observability solutions for software systems
• Demonstrated ability to build and lead high-performing technical software engineering teams
• Excellent communication skills with experience presenting to executive leadership

Basic Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering and/or operations leadership experience
• Experience leading cloud-native software development on AWS, Azure or similar platforms
• Experience with software release management, CI/CD, and engineering operational processes

Organization Overview

Lilly IT builds and maintains capabilities using cutting edge technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Lilly IT is that we redefine what's possible through tech to advance our purpose - creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds, so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver innovative solutions in every area of our business.

Lilly's Software Product Engineering (SPE) organization is focused on building software platforms to accelerate our ability to reach and support patients, digitally. This organization is powered by software engineering experts that solve challenging problems around patient engagement and drug discovery with code.

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 ( 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 is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia Network, Black Employees at Lilly, Chinese Culture Network, Japanese International Leadership Network (JILN), Lilly India Network, Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), PRIDE (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN), Women's Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL), enAble (for people with disabilities). Learn more about all of our groups.

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate's education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is
$124,500 - $182,600

Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly's compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.

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