Scientific Lead - Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Applied Intelligence for Discovery
Eli Lilly and Company
August 23, 2026
Remote friendly (San Francisco, CA)
United States
Clinical Research and Development
The Opportunity
Forward Deployed AI Engineer (AI4D)
Key Responsibilities
- Embed with computational biology and disease biology teams to understand workflows, data, tools, and bottlenecks.
- Translate use-cases into concrete prototypes with clear success criteria; deliver working demos with evaluation benchmarks.
- Design and ship production systems for scientific problems; own integrations, data provenance, reliability, and on-call readiness.
- Apply LLMs, RAG, text-to-SQL, agentic AI frameworks to target identification, biomarker prioritization, mechanism of action studies, and insights from multi-omics datasets.
- Run evaluation loops against workflow-specific scientific benchmarks to drive model selection and iterative evidence generation.
- Distill learnings into reusable primitives, reference architectures, validation templates, and benchmark harnesses.
- Partner with AI/LLMOps to convert field-tested solutions into platform components.
Basic Qualifications
- PhD in computational biology/bioinformatics/data science/computer science (or related) with 3+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment; or MS with 5+ years (or equivalent).
Additional Skills/Preferences
- Strong Python; modern AI/ML + LLM experience (APIs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning); PyTorch/HuggingFace/LangChain-LlamaIndex (or similar).
- End-to-end ownership from scoping through production adoption; evaluation, error analysis, iterative evidence.
- Biology knowledge; multi-omics experience (RNA-seq, proteomics, GWAS, spatial transcriptomics, etc.) strongly preferred.
- Cloud (AWS preferred), Git; experience in pharma/biotech/life-sciences R&D.
- Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks; biological foundation models; ontologies/knowledge graphs; drive adoption with non-engineering users; open-source/public portfolio.
Compensation/Benefits
- Anticipated wage: $166,500–$266,200; eligible for company bonus; comprehensive benefits (401(k), medical/dental/vision, life insurance, vacation/time off, and well-being benefits).
Application Instructions
- If you need accommodation to submit a resume, complete the workplace accommodation request form: https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation
Forward Deployed AI Engineer (AI4D)
Key Responsibilities
- Embed with computational biology and disease biology teams to understand workflows, data, tools, and bottlenecks.
- Translate use-cases into concrete prototypes with clear success criteria; deliver working demos with evaluation benchmarks.
- Design and ship production systems for scientific problems; own integrations, data provenance, reliability, and on-call readiness.
- Apply LLMs, RAG, text-to-SQL, agentic AI frameworks to target identification, biomarker prioritization, mechanism of action studies, and insights from multi-omics datasets.
- Run evaluation loops against workflow-specific scientific benchmarks to drive model selection and iterative evidence generation.
- Distill learnings into reusable primitives, reference architectures, validation templates, and benchmark harnesses.
- Partner with AI/LLMOps to convert field-tested solutions into platform components.
Basic Qualifications
- PhD in computational biology/bioinformatics/data science/computer science (or related) with 3+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment; or MS with 5+ years (or equivalent).
Additional Skills/Preferences
- Strong Python; modern AI/ML + LLM experience (APIs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning); PyTorch/HuggingFace/LangChain-LlamaIndex (or similar).
- End-to-end ownership from scoping through production adoption; evaluation, error analysis, iterative evidence.
- Biology knowledge; multi-omics experience (RNA-seq, proteomics, GWAS, spatial transcriptomics, etc.) strongly preferred.
- Cloud (AWS preferred), Git; experience in pharma/biotech/life-sciences R&D.
- Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks; biological foundation models; ontologies/knowledge graphs; drive adoption with non-engineering users; open-source/public portfolio.
Compensation/Benefits
- Anticipated wage: $166,500–$266,200; eligible for company bonus; comprehensive benefits (401(k), medical/dental/vision, life insurance, vacation/time off, and well-being benefits).
Application Instructions
- If you need accommodation to submit a resume, complete the workplace accommodation request form: https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation