Operations Lead, AI Products & Agents

Lilly•Indianapolis, IN

About The Position

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, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined 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, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world. Organization Overview Software Product Engineering (SPE) builds and maintains capabilities using pioneering technologies like the most prominent tech companies. What differentiates SPE is that we create new possibilities through technology to advance our purpose—creating medicines that make life better for people around the world. From model-driven drug discovery to connected clinical trials to enterprise AI platforms, we hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver innovative solutions across every area of our business. Purpose of the Role We are seeking a senior, technically adept leader to drive the strategy, operations, and scale-up of AI-powered support products and agentic experiences at Lilly. The initial scope of this role centers on a portfolio of conversational AI products spanning workforce-facing and customer-facing chatbot experiences across IT, HR, Finance, and external engagement channels—delivered through multiple platforms and access points including MS Teams, web applications, and embedded widgets. Over time, the scope will expand as Lilly scales its agentic support capabilities across the enterprise. In this role, you will own the product operations roadmap end to end—building and managing a team of AI agents and human operators, driving cross-functional alignment with engineering and product management, and ensuring every product in the portfolio delivers exceptional user experiences at scale. You will drive the long-term vision of consolidating disparate chatbot and support experiences into a unified, agentic platform, while identifying new opportunities to deploy AI agents that automate and improve how Lilly’s workforce gets things done. You will partner with distributed teams of Tech Leads, Engineers, and Product Managers to ship products that people love, drive measurable adoption, and continuously raise the bar on reliability and innovation. This role carries a platform transformation mandate. The current landscape includes multiple chatbot and support products built on different platforms and frameworks. You will help define and execute the strategy to rationalize this portfolio—evaluating which products to migrate onto Lilly’s enterprise AI platform and standard tooling for improved performance, accuracy, and cost efficiency; identifying where new AI agents should be built to automate workflows that don’t exist today; and determining which legacy bots should be consolidated or retired. This strategy is not yet fully defined—you will be a key voice in shaping it alongside engineering, product, and business leadership as the organization evolves. This is a high-impact role in a fast-moving environment for someone who thrives at the intersection of product strategy, technical operations, and AI. You’ll navigate ambiguity daily, move with urgency, and operate with the kind of ownership that turns undefined problems into shipped solutions. If you can zoom in on the details of a production incident and zoom out to articulate a multi-year platform vision to executive leadership—all in the same afternoon—this role is for you.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
10 years of experience leading software engineering projects, product operations, or technical program management in complex, fast-paced environments, including 5+ years leading cross-functional programs spanning software development, operations, and product delivery.
2+ years experience with chatbot platforms, agentic AI products, or enterprise conversational AI products.
Deep knowledge of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and hands-on familiarity working within Agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban).
5+ year experience managing or working on cross-functional, geographically distributed teams.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or a related field.
Direct experience building, deploying, or managing AI agents and LLM-powered applications (RAG, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, multi-agent systems).
Experience with observability platforms and tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog) for large-scale application monitoring.
Strong knowledge of ITIL frameworks, service operations, incident management, and process improvement methodologies.
Experience with cloud-based software platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
Experience working with enterprise chatbot frameworks (e.g., Kore.ai, Microsoft Bot Framework), NLP/NLU technologies, or custom agentic platforms.
Background in the biopharma or healthcare industry, or a strong interest in applying AI to improve patient and employee outcomes.
Experience with consumer-facing software products and understanding of international markets and global product rollouts.
Excellent communication skills—able to engage technically, with executive leadership, and peers across departments with equal clarity.
Software engineering background with proficiency in Python, Golang, or similar languages; able to read code, review PRs, and speak credibly with engineers.
Thrives in ambiguity—able to take an undefined problem, structure it, and drive it to resolution in a fast-paced environment with competing priorities and a deep sense of urgency.
Strong work ethic and bias toward action; comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and course-correcting quickly.

Responsibilities

Drive the strategy, planning, and delivery of Lilly’s conversational AI product portfolio, ensuring products ship on time, meet quality bars, and continuously improve based on user feedback and platform data.
Partner with Product Management and Engineering leads to ensure operational readiness for new features and releases—owning launch coordination, support enablement, monitoring, and feedback capture.
Own the operational health of all products in the portfolio, including uptime, performance, user satisfaction, and adoption metrics across platforms and channels.
Drive continuous product improvements that measurably increase user adoption, satisfaction, and operational efficiency through structured feedback loops and data-informed prioritization.
Assess the current chatbot and support product landscape and develop a strategic plan to consolidate and modernize onto Lilly’s enterprise AI platform and standard tooling, improving performance, accuracy, and maintainability.
Identify opportunities to build new AI agents that replace, enhance, or extend existing support experiences, leveraging modern agentic architectures and LLM capabilities.
Lead portfolio rationalization efforts—recommending which products to invest in, consolidate, or retire based on usage data, business value, and technical debt.
Partner with engineering and business leadership to co-create the transformation roadmap, navigating organizational change and aligning stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
Build, train, and manage a portfolio of AI agents that automate support, triage, and operational workflows—starting with the conversational AI product suite and expanding across the enterprise.
Drive innovation in agentic AI by evaluating and integrating emerging LLM capabilities, including RAG architectures, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and multi-agent orchestration.
Establish and enforce standards for AI agent development, testing, and evaluation that result in measurably higher accuracy, faster resolution times, and better user experiences.
Collaborate with data science and ML engineering teams to improve agent accuracy, reduce hallucination, and optimize conversational experiences.
Lead incident, change, and request management processes using ServiceNow and ITIL-based frameworks, ensuring minimal production impact and rapid resolution.
Build and maintain observability and monitoring infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) to proactively detect anomalies and drive system health.
Oversee on-call rotations, runbook development, and disaster recovery planning for all products in the portfolio.
Create and maintain operational dashboards, SLA reporting, and executive-level communications on product health and risk.
Collaborate with geographically distributed teams of Tech Leads, Engineers, Product Managers, and business stakeholders to drive alignment and delivery.
Partner with Cyber, Quality, Procurement, and other partner organizations to ensure compliance, security, and governance across the product portfolio.
Manage vendor relationships and certified partner engagements to optimize platform performance and scalability.
Provide coaching, mentorship, and technical guidance to team members, fostering a culture of operational excellence, continuous learning, and innovation.

Benefits

Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance).
Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).

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