Principal Production Engineer — Operations

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. Principal Production Engineer — Operations Job description About Lilly At Lilly, everything we do starts with patients. We unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our global team of over 50,000 employees work with urgency and purpose to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. We bring our best to this work because people depend on it. If you’re driven by purpose and determined to make a meaningful difference for patients, we invite you to bring your skill and your commitment to Lilly. About Tech@Lilly At Lilly, technology is not a support function. It is how a global medicine company operates, innovates, and delivers. Lilly in Hyderabad builds the capabilities that make this possible, cloud platforms, AI systems, and automation at enterprise scale, all in service of a purpose that makes this technology work genuinely distinctive, from advancing drug discovery to enabling connected clinical trials to keeping a global medicine company running at the standard patients deserve. Experience 10+ years Location Hyderabad (Onsite) Employment Type Full-time Job Family R3 — Operations / Application Support / Production Engineering / SRE-aligned Support Time Allocation Majority operational coverage and incident command · 20–30% engineering and toil reduction 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@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@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 Production Reliability Engineering team is the engineering-first function that owns operations, incident command, runbook automation, and the safe evaluation of agent-assisted remediation across a multi-application production estate. The estate is deliberately diverse: it spans low-code platforms (Power Platform, Power Automate), SaaS ecosystems (Salesforce / SFDC, SharePoint), traditional enterprise stacks (Java/JVM, .NET, Node.js, Python), automation platforms (RPA — Automation Anywhere, UiPath-class tooling), data and analytics platforms (Power BI, Tableau, relational and NoSQL databases), and the integration layer that ties them together. The team works in close partnership with the engineering team that builds the agentic automation platform that increasingly reduces manual operational load. Role summary As a Principal Production Engineer in Operations, you are the final-escalation authority within your shift and the named on-call anchor for the team. You drive root-cause analyses to engineering-grade quality before handoff to the SRE engineering practice in the same pillar, and you are the last call before the engineering lead is engaged. What sets this seat apart from a single-stack senior engineer is the breadth of technology you operate across. The estate covers low-code platforms, SaaS ecosystems, traditional enterprise stacks, RPA and automation tooling, integration middleware, and data and analytics platforms. You are expected to debug across all of them — not by memorising every product, but by reading logs, traces, code, and configuration in any reasonable stack and isolating where it broke. Candidates who thrive in this role pick up unfamiliar tech in weeks, not quarters. This is a senior individual-contributor role with real shift weight and real authority. The team supports continuous operations across multiple shifts, and you will anchor on-call coverage for your assigned shift while partnering with the engineering lead on cross-shift incident command. What you'll be doing 1) Shift anchor and on-call leadership Hold the on-call anchor role for your shift and lead the L1/L2/L3 operations engineers working alongside you; carry the page that the engineering lead does not. Direct triage and dispatch in real time: pull L1 and L2 to the work they can own, keep senior capacity on the hard problems, and step in only where the call genuinely needs you. Make incident-disposition decisions within your shift (escalate, resolve, or open a problem record) with disciplined judgment, and coach your team to make the same calls when you are not on the bridge. Run effective shift handoffs to maintain operational continuity across globally distributed teams, and raise the bar on handoff quality so the next shift inherits clarity, not noise. 2) Multi-stack debugging and major incident response Be the final-escalation point before the engineering lead, and earn the right to be the last call by consistently isolating fault domains across the stack faster than anyone else on shift. Debug across very different technology families — low-code (Power Platform, Power Automate), SaaS (Salesforce/SFDC, SharePoint), enterprise stacks (Java/JVM, .NET, Node.js, Python), RPA (Automation Anywhere or equivalent), integration middleware, and data/analytics platforms (Power BI, Tableau, SQL and NoSQL stores) — using logs, traces, metrics, code reading, and first-principles reasoning. Deep domain knowledge of every product is not the bar; the bar is finding where it broke and stopping the bleed. Lead in-shift major incident execution and partner with the engineering lead on cross-shift incident command. Own the bridge, drive comms, and keep the response moving.