Principal Engineer - Scientific Authoring (Frontier AI)
Eli Lilly and Company
5 hours ago
Remote friendly (Indianapolis, IN)
United States
IT
Position Summary
As a Principal Engineer in Frontier AI, you will build intelligent systems that transform how scientists create, analyze, and manage scientific documents.
Research & Innovation
- Design and implement AI agents for scientific document authoring, including literature synthesis, citation management, and figure/table generation
- Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems over scientific corpora, ELNs, and internal knowledge bases to ground AI outputs in factual content
- Develop domain-specific fine-tuning and prompt engineering strategies for chemistry, biology, and pharmacology content
- Create tools for automated quality checking: scientific accuracy, consistency, formatting compliance, and plagiarism detection
- Build multi-agent workflows that coordinate literature search, data extraction, drafting, and revision cycles
Solution Deployment
- Build production-grade authoring applications with robust software engineering practices (version control, testing, CI/CD)
- Deploy scalable services on cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS) with appropriate guardrails for scientific content
- Partner with scientists, medical writers, and regulatory teams to integrate AI authoring tools into real workflows
External Engagement
- Represent Frontier AI in internal forums and external AI/NLP research communities
- Evaluate external vendors, open-source tools, and academic collaborations for scientific authoring capabilities
Basic Qualifications
- MS + 1 year / BS + 2 years equivalent experience in Computer Science, Chemical sciences, Bioinformatics, or related discipline with demonstrated scientific domain exposure
- 1–2 years applying NLP/LLM techniques to text generation, summarization, or information extraction (including industry post-doc)
- Hands-on experience with LLM application development (prompt engineering, RAG architectures, agent frameworks)
- Strong software engineering skills: production-quality Python, version control, testing, CI/CD
- Deep experience with ML/NLP frameworks (PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex)
- Authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis (no visa/work authorization sponsorship)
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with scientific document formats (LaTeX, XML/JATS, regulatory submission standards)
- Familiarity with biomedical NLP (PubMed, chemical NER, ontologies like MeSH or ChEBI)
- Working knowledge of vector databases and semantic search (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector)
- Publications in relevant ML/NLP venues (ACL, KDD, NeurIPS)
Benefits
- Company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation; medical, dental, vision, and prescription benefits; flexible benefits; life insurance; certain time off/leave; well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, employee clubs/activities)
Application Instructions
- If you require accommodation to submit a resume, complete the workplace accommodation request form: https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation
As a Principal Engineer in Frontier AI, you will build intelligent systems that transform how scientists create, analyze, and manage scientific documents.
Research & Innovation
- Design and implement AI agents for scientific document authoring, including literature synthesis, citation management, and figure/table generation
- Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems over scientific corpora, ELNs, and internal knowledge bases to ground AI outputs in factual content
- Develop domain-specific fine-tuning and prompt engineering strategies for chemistry, biology, and pharmacology content
- Create tools for automated quality checking: scientific accuracy, consistency, formatting compliance, and plagiarism detection
- Build multi-agent workflows that coordinate literature search, data extraction, drafting, and revision cycles
Solution Deployment
- Build production-grade authoring applications with robust software engineering practices (version control, testing, CI/CD)
- Deploy scalable services on cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS) with appropriate guardrails for scientific content
- Partner with scientists, medical writers, and regulatory teams to integrate AI authoring tools into real workflows
External Engagement
- Represent Frontier AI in internal forums and external AI/NLP research communities
- Evaluate external vendors, open-source tools, and academic collaborations for scientific authoring capabilities
Basic Qualifications
- MS + 1 year / BS + 2 years equivalent experience in Computer Science, Chemical sciences, Bioinformatics, or related discipline with demonstrated scientific domain exposure
- 1–2 years applying NLP/LLM techniques to text generation, summarization, or information extraction (including industry post-doc)
- Hands-on experience with LLM application development (prompt engineering, RAG architectures, agent frameworks)
- Strong software engineering skills: production-quality Python, version control, testing, CI/CD
- Deep experience with ML/NLP frameworks (PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex)
- Authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis (no visa/work authorization sponsorship)
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with scientific document formats (LaTeX, XML/JATS, regulatory submission standards)
- Familiarity with biomedical NLP (PubMed, chemical NER, ontologies like MeSH or ChEBI)
- Working knowledge of vector databases and semantic search (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector)
- Publications in relevant ML/NLP venues (ACL, KDD, NeurIPS)
Benefits
- Company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation; medical, dental, vision, and prescription benefits; flexible benefits; life insurance; certain time off/leave; well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, employee clubs/activities)
Application Instructions
- If you require accommodation to submit a resume, complete the workplace accommodation request form: https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation