Server Virtualization Platform Operations Engineer

Eli Lilly and Company • Us, IN

4d • Onsite

About The Position

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. Join us in revolutionizing Infrastructure Operations with AI and Automation! The Cloud and Connectivity organization is actively looking for a VMware ESX Platform Operations Engineer to join them. Do you like to solve challenges and have an interest in large scale impact? Would you like the ability to impact global public and private cloud infrastructure operations through AI and Automation, including applying modern AI-powered coding and automation tools to accelerate engineering workflows? If so, please apply. We are seeking multiple Server Virtualization Platform Operations Engineers with experience supporting and managing enterprise VMware ESX-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities, both on-premises and in Microsoft Azure. The ideal candidate will play a critical role in maintaining system stability, automating operational tasks, and ensuring high availability for critical workloads, including leveraging modern AI automation tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or similar) to improve efficiency and streamline engineering workflows. If you have a solid background in VMware administration, server virtualization, and thrive in multifaceted enterprise environments, this position offers an excellent chance to advance your career. You'll be involved in maintaining critical infrastructure components, supporting multi-datacenter operations, and implementing solutions that improve availability and reliability. This role will work with the most critical infrastructure supporting all Lilly Manufacturing and research sites in multi-datacenter stretch clusters. Our goal is to improve the availability of infrastructure and reliability through repeatable patterns, new architectural designs, improvements in observability to prevent outages to help increase value across the organization. The role will also provide mentorship and direction to our global Lilly operations SMEs and other platform infrastructure operations SME to deliver the daily operations associated with this area.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or related technical field
• 4+ years of experience as a VMware ESX / Platform Engineer
• Demonstrated experience or exposure to AI-enabled automation tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or similar), with the ability to apply them in engineering or operational contexts
• Qualified applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis
• Technical expertise and leadership to turn ideas and concepts into solutions
• Strong hands-on experience with automated infrastructure availability and resiliency (VMWare/vSphere/Storage replication) at enterprise scale along with virtualized Windows or Linux OS platforms
• Experience leveraging AI-driven automation tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or similar) to streamline engineering workflows, improve efficiency, or support infrastructure operations
• Ability to optimize, configure, and maintain private cloud infrastructure capabilities to help build, configure, and maintain systems
• Consistent track record of high quality, agile focused, team-based solution delivery
• Excellent analytical, problem solving and communication skills, working across global and diverse teams
• Deep understanding of networking concepts like VLANs and trunking
• Prior experience configuring and leading VMware networking components, including Distributed Switches (vDS), to ensure efficient and secure network communication

Nice To Haves

• Linux, Windows, VMware vSphere, Dell SAN storage or Cloud certifications
• Technical leadership supporting enterprise grade infrastructure solutions and leading the deployment at multiple global locations
• Knowledge and experience with modern VMware ESX, Azure VMware Service, IaaS cloud services (EC2, Azure Compute), or languages and tools such as Python, JSON, YAML, ARM, Git
• Experience with Zerto and VMware HCX technologies
• Experience leading operations of a global large-scale ESX infrastructure service

Responsibilities

• Maintaining system stability
• Automating operational tasks
• Ensuring high availability for critical workloads
• Leveraging modern AI automation tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or similar) to improve efficiency and streamline engineering workflows
• Maintaining critical infrastructure components
• Supporting multi-datacenter operations
• Implementing solutions that improve availability and reliability
• Improving the availability of infrastructure and reliability through repeatable patterns, new architectural designs, improvements in observability to prevent outages
• Provide mentorship and direction to our global Lilly operations SMEs and other platform infrastructure operations SME to deliver the daily operations associated with this area
• Drive Infrastructure Operations to never have to fix the same problem twice through adoption of AI OPS, Event Driven Automation, and robust Observability
• Accelerate initiatives in areas such as: Infrastructure AI OPS automation, cloud IaaS management, and cloud infrastructure as code to enable critical business projects
• Transform our operations processes using proactive, predictive, and automated AI & Observability capabilities
• Bring a high learning agility and Infrastructure operations / engineer skills to help us enable the Lilly Technology strategy, identifying tech opportunities, and accelerate our AI OPS journey

Benefits

• company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance)
• 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
• 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: Mid Level