Associate Director

Job Description

The Associate Director - Discovery Informatics will play a strategic leadership role in driving tech strategy, governance, process consistency, and compliance across LCCI LRL Discovery TECHLILLY areas. This role will influence and shape the IT agenda for Discovery team, while contributing to the strategy and roadmap of broader LRL Tech, ensuring alignment with key investment programs and the strategic priorities of the information officer s office. The role demands a strong technical and domain leadership presence to drive innovation, AI capabilities, and engineering excellence in the Discovery Informatics space, focusing on computational drug discovery, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and translational informatics.

Key Responsibilities:

- Lead the tech strategy, governance, processes, and compliance efforts across Discovery Informatics, ensuring seamless collaboration across global LRL and LCCI teams.
- Define and execute a multi-year strategy and capability roadmap for LRL TechLilly, ensuring alignment with business objectives in computational drug discovery and informatics.
- Drive innovation and AI adoption in Research domain,maximizing the impact of emerging technologies such as deep learning, molecular simulations, and generative AI for drug design.
- Ensure excellence in portfolio delivery with a focus on Outcome over Ownership, leveraging best-in-class strategy and engineering KPIs for cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and computational chemistry initiatives.
- Strong ability to strategize, lead and create software ecosystems that integrate with LIMS, ELN, compound registration systems, analytical instrumentation, and results repositories, ensuring seamless tracking of research data from experiment to publication.
- Build and lead high-performing product and engineering teams specializing in scientific computing, AI/ML-driven drug discovery, and translational informatics, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and collaboration.
- Establish and mature engineering capabilities within Discovery Informatics, enabling seamless integration of capabilities acrossResearch Scientific Apps, LabOps, Translational Bioinformatics, and AI-driven predictive modeling for drug discovery.
- Partner with global RD organizations, and other business stakeholders to drive digital transformation in discovery research, with a focus on omics data analytics, target identification, and biomarker discovery.
- Develop strategies to enhance cross-functional engagement and communication, ensuring business partners are actively connected to computational biology, systems pharmacology, and informatics-driven research initiatives.
- Provide mentorship and leadership development opportunities for emerging leaders within Discovery Informatics, with a focus on diversity and inclusion.
- Drive strategic initiatives such as Unlock the Power of AI across Discovery Informatics, leveraging AI for molecular docking, de novo drug design, and high-throughput screening data analysis.
- Champion the adoption of Quantum Computing and AI-driven research methodologies to accelerate discovery outcomes, including quantum simulations for molecular interactions and novel therapeutic development.
- Support and guide critical initiatives like Agentic Systems, Kernel Lilly, Catalyse 360 etc,contributing to LCCI s growth as a strategic thought leader within the global organization.
- Play a key role in Mergers Acquisitions (MA) initiatives, bringing strategic technology insights to enterprise-level decision-making, particularly in the integration of computational informatics platforms.
- Oversee and manage AI platform projects, ensuring their successful implementation and creating future opportunities for AI-driven research in areas
- Foster a strong research-technology synergy by guiding the technical strategy, data strategy, and architecture strategy for Discovery Informatics, ensuring scalable and reproducible computational workflows.
- Promote talent rotation to enhance domain expertise and business context among team members, specifically in informatics disciplines such as knowledge graph analytics, bio-ontologies, and FAIR data principles.
- Cultivate a cultureof bold leadership, challenging the status quo, and promoting diversity, particularly in leadership hiring and development within the computational drug discovery space.

Qualifications Experience:

- Degree in Computer Science, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Cheminformatics, Data Science, or a related field
- Experience in leading team that has expertise in designing frameworks that facilitate data exchange across discovery research systems, ensuring consistency between analytical pipelines, computational models, experimental results, and scientific publications
- Proven experience in leading large-scale technology initiatives within research and development organizations, particularly in computational drug discovery and translational informatics.
- Strong background in AI driven work, machine learning, and data science applications in drug discovery
- Experience in building and leading global cross-functional teams.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
- Ability to drive strategic initiatives, influence senior leadership, and lead complex projects from inception to execution.

Preferred Skills:

- Familiarity with regulatory and compliance requirements in the life sciences industry, including data integrity in research informatics.
- Experience working with engineering teams to develop accelerators, technical assets, and platforms for high-throughput screening, omics data integration, and AI-driven decision support systems.

This role presents an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of technological innovation in discovery informatics, driving impactful contributions to Lilly s global research and development initiatives.

Role:Technical Architect

Industry Type:Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences

Department:Engineering - Software & QA

Employment Type:Full Time, Permanent

Role Category:Software Development

Education

UG:Any Graduate

PG:Any Postgraduate

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