Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Job description

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 Eli Lilly  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, and to improve the understanding and management of disease. We're looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.  About BI&A and the AI Engineering Team  The Lilly Bengaluru Business Insights & Analytics (BI&A) team was started in 2017 with the objective of using innovative data mining and analytics to support business decisions for Marketing functions in the US and ex-US affiliates. The team has grown to more than 100 staff members across data management, data science, analytical techniques, pharmaceutical commercial operations, and business insights, and provides analytics outcomes that drive decision-making across Lilly's Marketing, Sales, Medical Affairs, and other functions. A parallel data and analytics team operates out of Indianapolis (HQ).  Within BI&A, the AI Engineering team designs, builds, and operates the platforms that take Lilly's commercial generative-AI and agentic-AI solutions from prototype to enterprise-scale production — including our agentic AI application platform and its transition to a modern, cloud-hosted architecture, and BI&A's participation in Lilly's broader enterprise agentic AI platform initiative.  Role Overview  We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join the AI Engineering team, with a primary focus on Hands-On Engineering (MLE) and MLOps & Platform Reliability. This posting is at level R2 on our engineering ladder — see the level framing below for the expected scope of ownership and impact.  Level framing: Independently applies advanced techniques; makes technical decisions within a defined scope; tackles moderately complex problems; may lead small projects.  Core Responsibilities  • Build and maintain production-grade ML/AI components and services with minimal supervision.  • Apply software engineering best practices (version control, testing, code review, documentation) across your work.  • Debug and resolve moderately complex issues spanning multiple components of the system.  • Take ownership of small features or workstreams end-to-end, from design through deployment.  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions) for ML/AI deployments; contribute to pipeline design for new projects.  • Work with Docker, Kubernetes, and Prefect to deploy and orchestrate ML/AI workloads across environments.  • Support models through deployment, monitoring, and retraining; escalate drift or degradation issues.  Key Tools & Technologies  • Cloud & Data Infra: AWS (EC2/ECS, S3, Lambda, IAM, CloudWatch or equivalent); Databricks & Unity Catalog  • Foundational: Python; Git/GitHub; software engineering best practices; testing; SQL  • MLOps & Deployment: Docker, Kubernetes, Prefect; CI/CD (GitHub Actions); production monitoring; model versioning & lineage; GitOps governance  Required Qualifications  • 4–8 years of hands-on experience building and operating ML/AI systems in production environments.  • Strong proficiency in Python and a track record of wri