Eli Lilly and Company · 2 days ago
Principal Engineer - Scientific Authoring (Frontier AI)
San Diego, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
2+ years expEli Lilly and Company is a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, dedicated to improving lives through innovative medicines. The Principal Engineer in Frontier AI will develop AI-powered tools for scientific document authoring, enhancing the efficiency of manuscript preparation, regulatory submissions, and technical documentation.
BiotechnologyHealthcarePharmaceuticalHealth CareMedical
No H1B
Responsibilities
Design and implement AI agents for scientific document authoring, including literature synthesis, citation management, and figure/table generation
Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems over scientific corpora, ELNs, and internal knowledge bases to ground AI outputs in factual content
Develop domain-specific fine-tuning and prompt engineering strategies for chemistry, biology, and pharmacology content
Create tools for automated quality checking: scientific accuracy, consistency, formatting compliance, and plagiarism detection
Build multi-agent workflows that coordinate literature search, data extraction, drafting, and revision cycles
Build production-grade authoring applications with robust software engineering practices (version control, testing, CI/CD)
Deploy scalable services on cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS) with appropriate guardrails for scientific content
Partner with scientists, medical writers, and regulatory teams to integrate AI authoring tools into real workflows
Represent Frontier AI in internal forums and external AI/NLP research communities
Evaluate external vendors, open-source tools, and academic collaborations for scientific authoring capabilities
Qualification
Required
MS + 1 yrs / BS + 2 yrs equivalent experience in Computer Science, Chemical sciences, Bioinformatics, or related discipline with demonstrated scientific domain exposure
1-2 years applying NLP/LLM techniques to text generation, summarization, or information extraction (including industry post-doc)
Hands-on experience with LLM application development (prompt engineering, RAG architectures, agent frameworks)
Strong software engineering skills: production-quality Python, version control, testing, CI/CD (GitHub portfolio a plus)
Deep experience with ML/NLP frameworks (PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex)
Qualified applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Lilly will not provide support for or sponsor work authorization or visas for this role, including but not limited to F-1 CPT, F-1 OPT, F-1 STEM OPT, J-1, H-1B, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, or L-1
Preferred
Experience with scientific document formats (LaTeX, XML/JATS, regulatory submission standards)
Familiarity with biomedical NLP (PubMed, chemical NER, ontologies like MeSH or ChEBI)
Working knowledge of vector databases and semantic search (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector)
Publications in relevant ML/NLP venues (ACL, KDD, NeurIPS)
Benefits
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
Well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities)
Company
Eli Lilly and Company
We're a medicine company turning science into healing to make life better for people around the world.
10001+ employees
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$6.5M2024-02-12Post Ipo Debt· $6.5M
1978-01-13IPO
Leadership Team
David Ricks
Chair, CEO
Lucas Montarce
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2026-02-12
Genetic Engineering News
2026-02-12
Company data provided by crunchbase