Advisor - Software Engineer - SPE

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. 

About Lilly 

At Lilly, everything we do starts with patients. We unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our global team of over 50,000 employees work with urgency and purpose to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. We bring our best to this work because people depend on it. If you’re driven by purpose and determined to make a meaningful difference for patients, we invite you to bring your skill and your commitment to Lilly. 

About Technology@Lilly

At Lilly, technology is not a support function. It is how a global medicine company operates, innovates, and delivers. Lilly in Hyderabad builds the capabilities that make this possible, cloud platforms, AI systems, and automation at enterprise scale, all in service of a purpose that makes this technology work genuinely distinctive, from advancing drug discovery to enabling connected clinical trials to keeping a global medicine company running at the standard patients deserve.

 

About the Business Function 

The Software Product Engineering (SPE) team is a specialized engineering group that delivers strategic solutions and differentiated capabilities. We take a forward-thinking approach, focusing on an enterprise platform and product mindset, ensuring that the solutions we build can be leveraged across Technology teams for broader impact and efficiency. 

As an Advisor Software Engineer (R5), you are a recognised technical authority who shapes the engineering direction of the SPE organisation. You combine deep, hands-on expertise in system design and distributed architecture with a forward-looking AI-first mindset – designing and building agentic AI systems, intelligent automation pipelines, and next-generation software platforms. You are the go-to person when teams face their hardest technical challenges, and you translate that expertise into scalable, production-grade solutions that drive measurable business outcomes across multiple functions. This is a high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role. You will architect end-to-end systems, write production code, champion AI-driven development practices, and influence engineering culture across teams – all while mentoring and coaching engineers to raise the overall technical bar.

What You’ll Be Doing
System Design & Architecture
Own end-to-end system design of large-scale, distributed, cloud-native platforms – from API contracts and data models to deployment topology and observability. Define and enforce architectural standards and patterns (microservices, event-driven, serverless, CQRS) and lead architecture reviews, ADRs, and technical blueprints. Design for resilience, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency on cloud platforms (AWS preferred; GCP/Azure acceptable). Drive decomposition of monolithic and COTS systems into modern, maintainable, in-house services and platform capabilities. Hands-On Full-Stack Engineering
Write production-quality code across the stack using modern languages and frameworks (e.g., Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Java, Rust, or equivalent) on both frontend and backend. Build and optimise APIs (RESTful, GraphQL), real-time communication layers, and high-throughput data pipelines with appropriate database technologies (relational, NoSQL, or columnar). Champion code quality through rigorous reviews, test-driven development, and CI/CD automation. Apply DevSecOps principles end-to-end.

AI-Driven & Agentic Engineering
Architect and build agentic AI systems that autonomously execute multi-step workflows – leveraging LLM orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, or equivalent), tool-use patterns, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Design AI-native architectures that embed intelligence into products: context-aware assistants, automated decision support, and self-healing infrastructure. Demonstrate mastery of prompt engineering, model evaluation, and responsible AI practices. Leverage AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor) and set the standard for the team. Evaluate emerging A