Principle SDET

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. About the technology organization Technology at Lilly builds and operates mission-critical digital products and platforms that support the discovery, development, and delivery of medicines that make life better for people around the world. Our teams operate in highly regulated, high-availability environments, where operational excellence, reliability, and quality are non-negotiable. Within Tech&#64;Lilly, the Digital Core organization applies a product, platform, and reliability-first mindset, ensuring that operational capabilities scale sustainably across the enterprise. About the Team Tech&#64;Lilly builds and maintains capabilities using pioneering technologies like the most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Lilly IT is that we redefine what's possible through tech to advance our purpose, creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, including data-driven drug discovery, connected clinical trials, resilient enterprise platforms, and intelligent digital operations. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds, so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver creative solutions in every area of our business. The Digital Core team leads Lilly's transformation into the Digital and AI era. They inspire digitally empowered teams to new ways of working and accelerate innovation and agility. This team powers and advances the entire company by building and maintaining world-class technology capabilities and platforms. Lilly Capability Centre India (LCCI), Hyderabad, is Lilly's premier Global Technology Hub, harnessing data, AI, analytics, and digital solutions to revolutionize healthcare and improve patient outcomes worldwide. The Reliability Engineering team is the engineering-first function that owns operations, incident response, runbook automation, and the safe evaluation of agentic remediation across a multi-application production estate. This role sits inside that team and owns test engineering for the work it ships, partnering closely with the peer engineering team that builds the agentic automation platform. Role summary As a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test, you own the quality bar for the Reliability Engineering function and act as the shift-left engineering partner across the wider application support organization. You are an engineer first and a tester second. You write code, you build test frameworks, you instrument quality signals into pipelines, and you raise the engineering standard for everything that ships through the team. This is not a manual QA role and it is not a role that catches defects late. You move quality left into design reviews, code reviews, CI gates, and observability, and you build the automated test machinery that lets a small engineering team ship agentic runbooks, remediation logic, and operational platforms with confidence. You are the engineer the team relies on to make sure what reaches production has been engineered for verifiability from the start. You partner with the senior reliability engineering leads, the agentic platform engineering team, and the senior architect. You are the single named owner for test strategy across your function, and the consulting voice on quality engineering across the wider organization. What you'll be doing 1) Shift-left test engineering and design partnership Embed in design reviews and architecture conversations before code is written. Raise testability, observability, and failure-mode questions early, and make sure the answers are engineered in, not bolted on. Define the test strategy for each platform, runbook, or agent the team ships, including unit, contract, integration, end-to-end, and behavioural tests for agentic and AI-augmented components. Set the quality gates that releases must clear in CI, and own the conversation when a gate blocks a release. The gates exist because you defended them. 2) Test automation framework engineering Build and maintain the test automation frameworks used across the reliability and agentic engineering teams. Engineers consume what you build; you do not write tests case by case for them. Engineer test harnesses for agentic systems: deterministic evaluation of agent outputs, regression suites for prompt and policy changes, golden-set comparison, and replay-based testing for runbook automation. Build contract tests between the agentic automation layer, the observability platform, the ITSM system of record, and the applications they act on, so changes on either side surface in CI rather than in production. Build chaos and resilience tests that exercise failure paths the team would not otherwise see until an incident. 3) CI/CD quality gating and pipeline ownership Own the quality stages in the team's CI/CD pipelines, including static analysis, security scanning hooks, coverage thresholds, performance regression checks, and gating policies. Drive shift-left static analysis, security linting, and dependency-risk checks into pull-request workflows, and tune them so they catch real issues without becoming noise. Engineer pre-production environments that mirror production sufficiently to validate runbook automation and agentic actions safely, including data masking, synthetic traffic, and replay harnesses. 4) Quality observability and signal engineering Treat observability as a testing surface. Engineer test signals into OpenTelemetry instrumentation so the same telemetry that runs production also validates correctness in lower environments. <spa