Agentic AI Solutions, Associate Director

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. Organization Overview At Lilly, we serve an extraordinary purpose. For nearly 150 years we have worked tirelessly to discover medicines that make life better. In Product Research and Development (PRD), we transform molecules into medicines, working through an increasingly external partner network across drug substance, drug product, and analytical services. PRD's External Supply Chain & Operations (ESCO) team stewards this external partner network — delivering supplier excellence, systematic and scalable sourcing workflows, supply chain design, technical-transfer processes, and end-to-end network performance across drug substance, drug product, and analytical services. As ESCO scales a harmonized supplier governance model and moves toward AI-enabled, agentic sourcing operations, it requires a net-new capability: hands-on agentic AI and applied ML expertise dedicated to building practical tools and autonomous agents for PRD's sourcing systems and business processes. This is a new position for the team, modeled on the agentic AI engineering capability DDCS has built within its Digital Transformation and Data Science team, adapted for ESCO's external-sourcing context. The Opportunity Today, ESCO sourcing leads spend significant time manually working through CDMO/CMO proposals, capacity data, technical-transfer records, audit and quality documentation, contracts, and supplier scorecards scattered across email, SharePoint, and Teams — to answer questions such as which partners have capacity for a given modality next quarter, how a partner performs across modalities, or where a program's technical transfer stands and what is blocking it. This role builds the agentic AI tools and systems that turn that manual, document-heavy work into fast, reliable, AI-assisted decisions. The Agentic AI Solutions Lead is a hands-on, full-stack build role responsible for designing, building, and deploying AI-enabled workflows, agentic sourcing systems, and document-intelligence tools that help ESCO colleagues turn complex CDMO/CMO information into actionable sourcing decisions. This is a builder role, not an architecture-and-handoff role: the individual personally develops and ships working agents and applications, in partnership with Tech@Lilly and PRD Strategy where enterprise platforms and standards intersect. The role bridges ESCO, PRD Strategy's End-to-End Supply Chain Design Process, Procurement, and Tech@Lilly — fluent in both the business realities of external sourcing (RFx, technical transfer, supplier governance, capacity planning) and the applied AI/ML engineering needed to automate them responsibly and at scale. Key Responsibilities AI Solutions Engineering & Practical Tool Delivery Partner with ESCO sourcing operations leads and category managers to identify, prioritize, and scope high-value opportunities where agentic AI, machine learning, and automation can improve speed, productivity, insight generation, and decision quality across the CDMO/CMO network. Translate stakeholder needs into practical AI tools, technical designs, acceptance criteria, and delivery plans that fit real sourcing, supplier-management, and technical-transfer workflows. Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, services, and workflows that integrate models, sourcing data sources, document collections, and user-facing interfaces for decision support and workflow automation. Agentic Sourcing AI Systems & Knowledge Extraction Create reusable agent skills, task harnesses, validators, run ledgers, and reproducibility controls that allow AI agents to execute diverse, long-running sourcing tasks reliably (e.g., capacity assessment, RFx analysis, technical-transfer status tracking). Build agentic knowledge extraction and question-answering systems for structured and unstructured sourcing content, including CDMO proposals, quality/audit reports, contracts, capacity data, technical-transfer records, and supplier scorecards. Design evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop escalation patterns so agentic outputs are auditable, traceable, and appropriate for high-consequence sourcing and supply-continuity decisions. Apply knowledge graphs, data ontologies, and structured knowledge representation where they improve retrieval, traceability, and reuse across the supplier and CDMO network. Decision Support & Workflow Transformation Build the PRD Supply Chain Intelligence (AI) agent end to end — from feasibility through pilot to production — as a core deliverable of this role, in coordination with Tech@Lilly and PRD Strategy's End-to-End Supply Chain Design Process. Turn information from CDMO/CMO documents, sourcing systems, and business processes into faster insights, stronger judgment, and improved ways of working across ESCO. Communicate model outputs, evidence, assumptions, limitations, uncertainty, and recommended actions through clear visualizations and decision-support outputs that influence solution adoption and sourcing decisions. Reliability, Validation, MLOps & Responsible AI Champion software engineering best practices including version control, automated testing, CI/CD, containers, documentation, reproducibility, observability, and fit-for-purpose MLOps/agent-ops practices. Develop validation, monitoring, documentation, and model-risk approaches aligned with intended use, responsible AI principles, GxP awareness, and regulatory expectations where applicable to sourcing and supply-chain decisions. Leverage cloud infrastructure to develop, test, deploy, and scale agentic workflows, document-intelligence systems, and analytics applications supporting ESCO. Cross-Functional Collaboration & Scientific/Business Translation Partner across ESCO, PRD Strategy, Procurement, PRD functional leaders (Drug Substance, Drug Product, Analytical, Packaging), and Tech@Lilly to align agentic tools with enterprise data and platform standards, including the Portfolio Intelligence Hub and the CS&D Supply Chain Control Tower. Coordinate with Tech@Lilly's formal CRO data exchange and digital workflow for CMC lab experiments so ESCO's agentic tools adopt existing digital exchange pathways rather than creating parallel ones. Translate complex AI findings into clear narratives and business cases that influence solution adoption, workflow redesign, and sourcing-team priorities. Capability Building, External Leadership & Mentorship Advance ESCO's technology roadmap for practical agentic AI tools, document intelligence, and reusable knowledge systems, drawing on DDCS's Digital Transformation and Data Science team as a cross-org reference and collaboration partner. Share methods, reference patterns, and l