Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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, we unite caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world. The Digital Engagement Tech@Lilly team builds solutions and capabilities for Marketing, Corporate Affairs and Medical organizations globally, and owns the consumer platforms and the governance around them. 

This role exists because the hardest problems in our space are not solved from a ticket queue. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you will sit with business, medical and marketing teams, understand how they actually work, and build working AI-enabled software with them, fast. You will go from a vague problem to a live product in weeks, then take what you learned and turn it into reusable patterns for the rest of the organization. 

Role Overview 

A forward deployed engineer is a senior, hands-on builder who works at the point where technology meets the business problem. You will be embedded with stakeholder teams, own outcomes end to end (discovery, design, build, deploy, adoption), and stay close enough to users to see what works and what does not. 

This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will spend most of your time building, across the front end, back end and AI layer, while working directly with product owners, system custodians, architects and compliance partners. You will operate with minimal supervision, set patterns and standards for others to follow, and mentor developers and engineers around you. Success means shipping reliable, well-governed solutions that people use, and that move a business metric. 

What You Will Build 

• Customer-facing and internal web applications in React, Nuxt or Vue, backed by Node.js APIs, built directly with business teams and shipped on short cycles. 

• Agentic and LLM-powered workflows for content, engagement and medical use cases: multi-agent orchestration, tool use and intelligent automation of manual work. 

• RAG and semantic search solutions over enterprise content and data, including embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking and Text2SQL where it fits. 

• Production AI services and APIs that integrate with enterprise data platforms, content systems and downstream product workflows. 

• Reusable patterns, templates, and accelerators that turn a one-off solution into something other teams can adopt. 

Key Responsibilities 

Embed and discover 

• Embed with business, medical and marketing teams to understand their workflows, pain points and constraints first-hand. 

• Frame ambiguous problems, decide what is worth building, and be direct about what is not feasible. 

• Prototype quickly, put working software in front of users early, and iterate on their feedback. 

Build and deliver end to end 

• Design and build full-stack solutions: responsive front ends, API integrations, Node.js services and the data layer behind them. 

• Integrate LLMs, RAG, agents and AI services into products, with evaluation, guardrails and monitoring for quality, latency and cost. 

• Own the delivery lifecycle: scoping and estimation, development, automated testing, CI/CD, deployment, monitoring and support handover. 

• Work with the technical lead and system custodian to keep what you ship maintainable, observable, and secure. 

Architecture and standards 

• Make architectural decisions that improve efficiency and maintain compliance in a regulated space. 

• Turn what you learn in the field into reusable components, templates, and reference implementations for cross-functional teams. 

• Set and uphold coding standards, review practices and engineering patterns across teams. 

Responsible AI, security and governance 

• Apply secure-by-design and privacy-by-design principles, and build in traceability, grounding, auditability and human oversight. 

• Work with quality, compliance and risk partners, so solutions meet regulatory and enterprise requirements, including content review processes. 

• Maintain clear architecture, design, and support documentation for everything you put into production. 

Mentoring and influence 

• Provide hands-on technical guidance to developers and engineers, review designs and code, and raise the bar through practical examples. 

• Communicate trade-offs, risks and recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior leaders. 

• Bring practical feasibility, scalability, and value considerations into roadmap planning. 

Required Qualifications 

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of building and shipping production systems end to end. 

• 4+ years building customer-facing or business-facing solutions in close partnership with stakeholders, such as forward deployed, solutions engineering, consulting engineering or embedded product engineering roles. 

• Expert in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/TypeScript and React, with Nuxt or Vue a plus; strong in responsive design and web standards. 

• Strong back-end experience with Node.js (Express, Koa or Hapi) and API design and integration (REST, GraphQL). 

• 2+ years of hands-on generative AI delivery: LLMs, prompt and context engineering, RAG, embeddings, agentic workflows, and evaluation of model outputs. 

• Working proficiency in Python and SQL, and experience with frameworks such as LangChain, DSPy or Hugging Face. 

• Strong experience with unit and integration testing frameworks such as Jest, Mocha, Chai or Jasmine. 

• Experience designing, deploying and operating services on a major cloud (AWS preferred), with CI/CD, containers and monitoring. 

• Strong system design and architecture fundamentals: version control (GitHub), code reviews, and secure, maintainable, observable code. 

• Experience working in Agile teams, including scoping, estimation and backlog ownership. 

• Proven ability to turn ambiguous business problems into scalable solutions with measurable value, and to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Pharmaceutical, healthcare or other regulated-industry experience, including working within content review, privacy and compliance processes. 

• Experience with multi-agent systems, tool use, Text2SQL, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and LLM evaluation. 

• Experience with vector databases, lakehouse platforms (such as Databricks), and enterprise AI platforms (such as SageMaker or Azure ML). 

• Experience fine-tuning or adapting models, and optimizing AI systems for quality, latency, throughput and cost. 

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions and MLflow, or equivalent LLMOps tooling. 

• Experience working across multiple concurrent projects and with stakeholders in different countries and time zones. 

• Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms or accelerators that other teams adopt. 

• Familiarity with web experience platforms, CMS and content operations. 

Professional Skills and Education 

• Comfortable in ambiguity: you move without a spec, make sound calls with incomplete information, and know when to ask. 

• High ownership and self-direction, with the maturity to work with minimal supervision. 

• Strong communicator, written and verbal, who can earn trust quickly with senior business stakeholders.

• Pragmatic builder who favors working software and fast feedback over perfect plans. 

• Curious and quick to learn new technologies, with a drive to improve existing business and technical processes. 

• Strong coordination skills and the ability to balance several projects at once. 

• Demonstrated leadership, teamwork, and collaboration in a professional setting. 

Education: Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering or a related technical field. A master's degree is preferred. Equivalent practical experience is considered. 

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 (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) 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 does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.