BU Master Data Associate Director

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.

About the Tech@Lilly Organization:

Tech@Lilly builds and maintains capabilities using cutting edge technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Tech@Lilly is that we create new possibilities through tech to advance our purpose – creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. 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 innovative solutions in every area of the enterprise.

About the Business Function:

Tech@Lilly Business Units is a global organization strategically positioned so that through information and technology leadership and solutions, we create meaningful connections and remarkable experiences, so people feel genuinely cared for. The Business Unit organization is accountable for designing, developing, and supporting commercial or customer engagement services and capabilities that span multiple Business Units (Bio-Medicines, Diabetes, Oncology, International), functions, geographies, and digital channels. The areas supported by Business Unit includes: Customer Operations, Marketing and Commercial Operations, Medical Affairs, Market Research, Pricing, Reimbursement and Access, Customer Support Programs, Digital Production and Distribution, Global Patient Outcomes, and Real-World Evidence.

Job Title: BU Master Data Associate Director - Ops

The Associate Director – Data Operations will lead a global team responsible for round-the-clock (24x7) data platform operations, ensuring uptime, performance, and reliability across regions and time zones. This role demands strong leadership in managing incident resolution, service requests, and proactive monitoring to meet SLAs and deliver uninterrupted business continuity. The ideal candidate will drive the transformation of operations through intelligent automation and AI—implementing AIOps, anomaly detection, root cause prediction, and self-healing mechanisms to reduce manual interventions and accelerate issue resolution. This role involves close collaboration with engineering, infrastructure, and business teams, as well as transparent reporting of KPIs and operational metrics to senior leadership. The candidate will foster a culture of continuous improvement, team accountability, and operational excellence. Success in this role requires deep expertise in managing complex data environments, people leadership, process maturity, and a passion for using technology to solve operational challenges.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead and manage a global Data Operations team providing 24x7 support for data platforms, pipelines, and critical business services.
• Oversee incident and problem management, ensuring timely resolution of tickets within defined SLAs and proactive reduction of recurring issues.
• Drive operational efficiency through the adoption of AIOps capabilities such as anomaly detection, automated alerting, root cause analysis, and self-healing workflows.
• Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to ensure stable and scalable data environments across cloud and on-prem platforms.
• Define and monitor KPIs and operational dashboards, sharing insights and performance metrics with senior leadership on a regular cadence.
• Develop and standardize processes for change management, deployment governance, capacity planning, and business continuity.
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives including playbook automation, runbook maturity, and knowledge base development.
• Foster a high-performance, agile team culture with strong accountability, cross-training, and career growth pathways.
• Ensure adherence to security, compliance, and audit requirements in daily operations.
• Act as the escalation point for critical incidents and interface with business stakeholders for timely communication and impact management.

How You Will Succeed: 

• Lead with accountability: Set clear expectations, inspire high performance, and build a culture of ownership and continuous improvement within your operations team.
• Champion AI and automation: Identify opportunities to implement AIOps and automation that reduce manual intervention, improve incident response, and enhance system reliability.
• Ensure operational excellence: Monitor KPIs, SLAs, and system health metrics to proactively manage risks, maintain uptime, and deliver superior service levels globally.
• Communicate with impact: Translate operational performance, root cause trends, and insights into clear updates for senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with engineering, infrastructure, and business teams to streamline issue resolution, enable platform scalability, and improve user experience.
• Enable continuous learning: Promote knowledge sharing, playbook development, and skill advancement across the team to improve response quality and reduce ticket turnaround time.
• Navigate complexity: Manage high-pressure situations across time zones, ensuring smooth handoffs, consistent service, and clear escalation paths for critical incidents.

What You should Bring:

• Proven expertise in managing 24x7 operational support, incident management, and ensuring adherence to SLAs in data engineering or analytics environments.
• Strong understanding of data platforms, ETL pipelines, and cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience implementing or working with AIOps platforms to automate alerting, resolution workflows, and root cause analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale operations teams, manage shift-based models, and drive process standardization and improvement.
• Strong interpersonal and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with engineering, product, and senior leadership.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a data-driven mindset and comfort handling ambiguity in high-pressure environments.
• Familiarity with tools like ServiceNow, Jira, or similar for operational tracking and reporting.

Basic Qualifications and Experience Requirement:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related field.
• 12+ years of total experience in IT/data operations, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership or operations lead role.
• Proven experience managing mission-critical data operations in a 24x7 environment, preferably in a global, matrixed organization.
• Strong background in ETL workflows, orchestration tools (e.g., Apache Airflow, Control-M), and cloud-based data pipelines.
• Exposure to incident, change, and problem management processes, aligned with ITIL or SRE frameworks.
• Familiarity with AIOps tools and practices to drive intelligent automation and issue resolution.
• Experience managing onshore/offshore teams and working across multiple time zones.
• Demonstrated ability to define and report on KPIs/SLAs for operational performance and team productivity.

Additional Skills/Preferences:

• Domain experience in healthcare, pharmaceutical ( Customer Master, Product Master, Alignment Master, Activity, Consent etc.  ), or regulated industries is a plus.

• Partner with and influence vendor resources on solution development to ensure understanding of data and technical direction for solutions as well as delivery
• AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate
• Databricks Certified Data Engineer (Associate or Professional)
• AWS Certified Architect (Associate or Professional)
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows and integrating machine learning models into data pipelines

Additional Information:

• N/A

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 does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

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