Senior Principal Application Support Engineering Lead – AI Products & Agents

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 Tech@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. 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. Senior Principal Application Support Engineering Lead– AI Products & Agents Job Description **Job Level:** R4 – Senior Principal **Experience:** 10–14+ years **Location:** Hyderabad (Onsite) **Employment Type:** Full-time **Job Family:** Operations / Application Support / Production Engineering / SRE-aligned Support About the Technology Organization Technology at Lilly builds and operates mission-critical digital products and platforms that support the discovery, development, and delivery of medicines that make life better for people around the world. Our teams operate in highly regulated, high-availability environments, where operational excellence, reliability, and quality are non-negotiable. The Software Product Engineering (SPE) organization applies a product, platform, and reliability-first mindset, ensuring that operational capabilities scale sustainably across the enterprise. Role Summary As a Senior Principal Application Support Engineering Lead (R4), you are the senior-most operational authority for a technology team or portfolio of applications. You will lead Support Operations end-to-end, owning operational outcomes across availability, incident management, readiness, and continuous reliability improvement. This role is both strategic and hands-on. You are accountable for: - The health, stability, and operability of production systems - The effectiveness and maturity of support operations - Shift leadership and execution during critical operational windows - Influencing engineering, product, and platform teams to prevent incidents—not just respond to them At R4, success is measured by organizational impact, operational predictability, and the ability to scale reliability through others. What You'll Be Doing (Key Responsibilities) 1) Support Operations Leadership & Shift Ownership - Lead end-to-end support operations for a technology team, ensuring consistent execution across shifts and time zones. - Act as the primary operational leader during assigned shifts, accountable for incident response quality, prioritization, and decision-making. - Ensure effective shift handovers, operational continuity, and shared accountability across global support teams. - Establish and evolve shift-level operating models, escalation paths, and decision frameworks. 2) Major Incident Command & Executive Escalation - Serve as the incident commander for the most complex, high-impact production incidents. - Lead war-room execution, cross-team coordination, and recovery strategy across engineering, product, platform, security, and vendor teams. - Provide clear, timely, and confident communication to senior technology and business stakeholders during outages. - Ensure incidents are handled with rigor, consistency, and accountability. 3) Enterprise Problem Management & Defect Elimination - Own Problem Management for recurring and systemic issues across the supported technology landscape. - Drive high-quality Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and ensure corrective actions address root causes—not symptoms. - Hold teams accountable for long-term fixes and track outcomes to measurable reliability improvements. - Identify cross-product failure patterns and influence architectural or platform-level remediation. 4) Reliability Strategy & Operational Excellence - Define and drive operational reliability strategy for the technology team, aligned with SRE and production engineering principles. - Influence the adoption of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and reliability reporting across products. - Champion improvements in availability, performance, scalability, resilience, and recovery capabilities. - Establish and enforce operational readiness standards (runbooks, rollback plans, monitoring coverage, post-release validation). 5) Observability, Automation & Toil Reduction - Set direction for observability strategy across logs, metrics, and traces, ensuring actionable insights and high signal quality. - Drive automation initiatives that significantly reduce manual effort, human error, and MTTR. - Promote standard tooling, reusable runbooks, and automated remediation patterns across teams. - Ensure support operations scale