Principal Product Manager — Cortex Platform

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.

Organization Overview:

Principal Product Manager — Cortex Platform

Software Product Engineering (SPE)  |  Eli Lilly and Company

Lilly is leading agentic transformation in the life sciences, and our Cortex enterprise AI platform powers how medicines are discovered, developed, and delivered worldwide leveraging this exciting and faced paced technology space. Cortex is the foundation beneath Lilly’s intelligent agents, models, and AI-enabled workflows across the company, enabling thousands of developers to move fast with confidence.

We’re hiring a Principal Product Manager to join the Cortex Platform team.  You will help define and deliver a deeply technical AI roadmap with real user impact. This is a platform-builder role: you’ll shape the infrastructure and capabilities that every AI team at Lilly builds on, while simultaneously driving the agentic transformation for all of Lilly.

This role is for a PM who has built enterprise-grade platforms at scale, thinks in systems, understands what developers need, and can hold the line between demo-quality and production-grade. You stay at the bleeding edge of AI as someone who synthesizes what the industry is doing and applies it to move Lilly forward.  Cortex is on an exciting grow curve, powered by user adoption, tool use, and enterprise connectivity among our tools.

What You'll Build:

• Platform resilient systems that serve thousands of developers across research, manufacturing, and the enterprise
• MCP tooling, authentication, and agent infrastructure in a regulated environment
• Implementations and integrations to new and emerging AI technology.
• Performant and stable long-term company assets
• Abstractions so teams can build quickly without creating one-offs
• Governed  model integrations

You’ll own critical components of the Cortex Platform end-to-end—from capability strategy through developer adoption, with accountability for outcomes.

What You’ll Do:

Define and maintain your roadmap, making prioritization calls that balance near-term developer needs with long-term platform architecture

• Own the developer experience: how teams onboard, discover capabilities, integrate models and tools, and get unblocked
• Make hard build-vs-buy decisions across model providers, MCP tooling, infrastructure components, and third-party integrations
• Translate complex platform architecture into clear product requirements—written PRDs are a first-class deliverable in this role
• Stay obsessively current on the AI landscape—what Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and the open-source community are shipping—and bring that intelligence to roadmap and architecture decisions
• Press the organization toward truly agentic patterns: push past simple LLM integrations toward multi-step reasoning, tool use, and autonomous workflows
• Represent the platform in executive settings: build the narrative, present the data, and earn support for the roadmap
• Partner directly with engineers—you understand the technical tradeoffs and can engage at the level of architecture, not just requirements
• Author clear, complete Product Requirements Documents for every major platform capability
• Write executive briefings and platform reviews that communicate technical complexity without losing the strategic thread
• Maintain living documentation that keeps developers, engineers, and leadership aligned as the platform evolves

How You'll Succeed:

• Developer adoption and active usage across Lilly teams
• Platform reliability, latency, and incident metrics
• Capability coverage relative to team demand and industry benchmarks
• Developer satisfaction and time-to-productivity
• Business and scientific impact enabled by platform capabilities

Your Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years of product management experience, with meaningful work in platforms, developer tools, or AI systems
• Experience shipping platforms adopted at enterprise scale
• Prior experience as an engineer, ML engineer, or software architect

What You Should Bring:

• Advanced degree preferred
• Experience delivering executive-level presentations and earning investment for technical roadmaps
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping enterprise-grade platforms at scale—platforms trusted by thousands of developers, where resilience, API design, and developer experience are non-negotiable
• Deep technical fluency: you can engage meaningfully with architecture decisions, understand tradeoffs, and earn the respect of strong engineers
• Genuine command of modern AI: LLMs, tool/function calling, RAG, agentic frameworks, MCP, and the emerging orchestration landscape
• Strong intuition for what it means to be truly agentic—and the conviction to push the organization past surface-level AI adoption
• Proven judgment on build-vs-buy calls
• Exceptional written communication: you write PRDs that teams can build from and executive narratives that earn alignment
• Comfort presenting to senior leadership
• Solid grasp of enterprise security: authentication, authorization, audit, and the constraints of regulated environments
• Bias for action and confidence operating in ambiguity

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

$126,000 - $224,400

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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