Sr. Data Analyst – AI

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

The Bioproduct Research and Development organization strives to deliver creative medicines to patients by developing and commercializing insulins, monoclonal antibodies, novel therapeutic proteins, peptides, oligonucleotide therapies, and gene therapy systems. This multidisciplinary group works collaboratively with our discovery and manufacturing colleagues.

We are seeking a highly skilled and innovative data scientist with deep AI/ML expertise to lead the application of large language models (LLMs) in building an AI-powered knowledge discovery platform for drug research and development.

In this role, you will be embedded in the Data Science & Analytics team, driving the problem definition, technical applications, and fine-tuning of LLMs to enable advanced search, summarization, and insight extraction from millions of proprietary scientific documents.

In this role you will partner closely with Tech@Lilly to scale the solutions and build robust digital products with modern infrastructure. Your primary focus will be bridging scientific needs and AI capabilities—deciphering complex problem spaces, prototyping ML solutions, fine-tuning models, and validating impact.

This is a pivotal role at the intersection of AI, data science, drug development, and IT. It shapes a proprietary AI copilot to accelerate product development and decision-making.

Key Responsibilities:

·       Lead the definition and prototyping of LLM-based solutions to enable search, summarization, and knowledge extraction across internal proprietary data and documents.

·       Translate scientific and business problems into AI/ML solutions, identifying key use cases, data sources, and model requirements.

·       Fine-tune large language models on proprietary biomedical/pharmaceutical corpora to improve domain specificity and performance

·       Build prototype pipelines and proof-of-concept models to demonstrate feasibility and value.

·       Collaborate with Tech@Lilly architecture and engineering teams to align solution design with enterprise architecture and infrastructure requirements.

·       Serve as the AI/ML expert and technical advisor, guiding model selection, evaluation metrics, experimentation, and tradeoffs.

·       Continuously investigate and incorporate advancements in LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge graphs, and AI search technologies into the solution roadmap.

·       Partner with data engineers, scientists, and Tech@Lilly stakeholders to ensure solutions meet user needs and integrate effectively into existing systems

Minimum Requirements:

• Master’s Degree in Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, Computer Science, or related technical field
• Strong hands-on expertise fine-tuning large language models (GPT, LLaMA, Claude, PaLM, etc.) and working with transformer-based architectures
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as Hugging Face, LangChain, PyTorch, or TensorFlow
• Deep knowledge of semantic search, embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval-augmented architectures

Additional Skills/Preferences:

• Proven ability to translate ambiguous business problems into concrete ML solutions
• Strong collaboration skills to work cross-functionally with IT, data engineering, and domain experts
• Experience applying LLMs to scientific or biomedical data sets
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs and hybrid retrieval architectures
• Prior experience in regulated industries (life sciences, pharma, healthcare)
• Experience building AI prototypes that have transitioned to enterprise-scale solutions in partnership with IT
• Strong communication skills to explain complex technical solutions to non-technical stakeholders

Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.

Lilly is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia Network, Black Employees at Lilly, Chinese Culture Network, Japanese International Leadership Network (JILN), Lilly India Network, Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), PRIDE (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN), Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL), enAble (for people with disabilities). Learn more about all of our groups.

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location.  The anticipated wage for this position is

Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly’s compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.

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