Principal Product Manager — Cortex Platform

Eli Lilly and Company • Indianapolis, IN

2d

About The Position

Lilly is leading agentic transformation in the life sciences, and our Cortex enterprise AI platform powers how medicines are discovered, developed, and delivered worldwide leveraging this exciting and faced paced technology space. Cortex is the foundation beneath Lilly’s intelligent agents, models, and AI-enabled workflows across the company, enabling thousands of developers to move fast with confidence. We’re hiring a Principal Product Manager to join the Cortex Platform team. You will help define and deliver a deeply technical AI roadmap with real user impact. This is a platform-builder role: you’ll shape the infrastructure and capabilities that every AI team at Lilly builds on, while simultaneously driving the agentic transformation for all of Lilly. This role is for a PM who has built enterprise-grade platforms at scale, thinks in systems, understands what developers need, and can hold the line between demo-quality and production-grade. You stay at the bleeding edge of AI as someone who synthesizes what the industry is doing and applies it to move Lilly forward. Cortex is on an exciting grow curve, powered by user adoption, tool use, and enterprise connectivity among our tools.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years of product management experience, with meaningful work in platforms, developer tools, or AI systems
• Experience shipping platforms adopted at enterprise scale
• Prior experience as an engineer, ML engineer, or software architect
• Solid grasp of enterprise security: authentication, authorization, audit, and the constraints of regulated environments

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree preferred
• Experience delivering executive-level presentations and earning investment for technical roadmaps
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping enterprise-grade platforms at scale—platforms trusted by thousands of developers, where resilience, API design, and developer experience are non-negotiable
• Deep technical fluency: you can engage meaningfully with architecture decisions, understand tradeoffs, and earn the respect of strong engineers
• Genuine command of modern AI: LLMs, tool/function calling, RAG, agentic frameworks, MCP, and the emerging orchestration landscape
• Strong intuition for what it means to be truly agentic—and the conviction to push the organization past surface-level AI adoption
• Proven judgment on build-vs-buy calls
• Exceptional written communication: you write PRDs that teams can build from and executive narratives that earn alignment
• Comfort presenting to senior leadership
• Bias for action and confidence operating in ambiguity

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain your roadmap, making prioritization calls that balance near-term developer needs with long-term platform architecture
• Own the developer experience: how teams onboard, discover capabilities, integrate models and tools, and get unblocked
• Make hard build-vs-buy decisions across model providers, MCP tooling, infrastructure components, and third-party integrations
• Translate complex platform architecture into clear product requirements—written PRDs are a first-class deliverable in this role
• Stay obsessively current on the AI landscape—what Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and the open-source community are shipping—and bring that intelligence to roadmap and architecture decisions
• Press the organization toward truly agentic patterns: push past simple LLM integrations toward multi-step reasoning, tool use, and autonomous workflows
• Represent the platform in executive settings: build the narrative, present the data, and earn support for the roadmap
• Partner directly with engineers—you understand the technical tradeoffs and can engage at the level of architecture, not just requirements
• Author clear, complete Product Requirements Documents for every major platform capability
• Write executive briefings and platform reviews that communicate technical complexity without losing the strategic thread
• Maintain living documentation that keeps developers, engineers, and leadership aligned as the platform evolves

Benefits

• company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance)
• company-sponsored 401(k)
• pension
• vacation benefits
• 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
• well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal