Associate Director - Database Platform Services

Associate Director- Database Reliability Engineering

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 Enterprise Data Platforms enable the platform has developed an integrated and intuitive data bases, integration, and analytics platform. This platform enables Lilly business functions quickly utilize the database services, integration services, and analytics platform.

Reporting to the Director and as Associate Director- Database Reliability Engineering will lead the operations, reliability, and performance engineering of on-premises and cloud database platforms supporting the Enterprise Data Platform. This leadership role focuses on scalability, automation, reliability, and operational excellence, enabling seamless support for mission-critical data services across analytical, transactional, and integration workloads.

The role requires a blend of deep database expertise, SRE principles, and operational leadership to drive stability, resiliency, and continuous improvement for hybrid enterprise-scale environments. How you will succeed:

Define and execute the database operations and reliability strategy, balancing performance, availability, and cost efficiency across on-prem and cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Establish and mature the DB RE model for database platforms, embedding reliability, observability, and automation in daily operations.

Partner with architects, engineering teams, and stakeholders to align operations with enterprise data and digital transformation goals.

Team Leadership & Collaboration

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Database Administrators, RE engineers, and platform specialists supporting global environments.

Foster a DevOps and SRE culture, driving collaboration between data engineering, analytics, application, and infrastructure teams.

Create operational playbooks, runbooks and implementing Agentic AI on the DB Ops and Observability to standardize and streamline incident response and recovery processes.

Operations & Platform Management

Oversee day-to-day operations of enterprise databases including Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and cloud-native services like RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, and Azure SQL.

Drive automation-first operations leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, Ansible and self-healing mechanisms.

Implement robust disaster recovery, failover, and capacity management processes to ensure high platform availability.

Lead performance engineering efforts, including capacity planning, tuning, and cost optimization.

SRE & Reliability Engineering

Build and maintain observability frameworks with metrics, logging, and tracing for proactive monitoring and alerting.

Define and manage Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for database services.

Establish incident management, problem management, and root cause analysis (RCA) processes to improve Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).

Champion a blameless post-mortem culture and drive continuous reliability improvements.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field.
• 4+ years of experience in enterprise database operations, with at least 5+ years in leadership roles managing hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
• Proven experience building and scaling SRE practices for data platforms in regulated, enterprise-scale environments.

Technical Skills

• Expertise in relational and NoSQL database platforms (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Graph DB, Mongo DB, Vector DB).
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native database services (AWS RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB; Azure SQL; GCP BigQuery).
• Proficiency in automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong understanding of observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, New Relic, or equivalent).
• Knowledge of high-availability architectures, replication, sharding, and database performance tuning.
• Familiarity with security frameworks and compliance requirements in regulated industries.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Uptime and reliability of database services.
• Reduction in Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
• Automation coverage and reduction in manual operations.
• Cost efficiency and capacity utilization metrics.
• Compliance audit success rates and zero security incidents.

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 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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