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.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer to join the AI Engineering team, with a primary focus on Hands-On Engineering (MLE) and MLOps & Platform Reliability and GenAI & Agentic Systems. This posting is at level R4 on our engineering ladder — see the level framing below for the expected scope of ownership and impact.
Level framing:



Recognized expert who mentors others; makes key technical decisions impacting multiple teams; leads resolution of highly complex challenges; cross-functional influence; may engage with external partners as an authority.
Core Responsibilities
- Design and build production backend systems for agentic AI applications — API layers, backend-for-frontend (BFF) patterns, session/state management, and streaming for concurrent multi-user workloads.
- Lead resolution of highly complex, cross-system technical challenges.
- Set the technical bar for hands-on engineering practice across the team.
- Own GitOps and engineering-governance standards across the team (version control, CI/CD, review, promotion).
- Make key MLOps/platform decisions that affect multiple teams (e.g. deployment topology, observability strategy).
- Drive triage and resolution of complex, cross-system production incidents.
- Own architecture for agentic AI systems, including routing, policy enforcement, and R

📌 Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Bengaluru)
🏢 Eli Lilly Services India
📍 Bengaluru