Principal Platform Engineer - Research Data Platform

Overview

Principal Platform Engineer on the Software Product Engineering team at Lilly in Bengaluru, building and operating the research data platform across DevOps, AI tooling and platform capabilities.

What you'll do

• Own and evolve the platform's delivery and runtime foundations across CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes/EKS and AWS services, so platform components can be built, deployed, scaled and rolled back safely.
• Design and maintain reliable deployment workflows using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, container registries, environment promotion strategies and automated validation gates for application and data-platform services.
• Strengthen operational excellence through observability, logging, metrics, alerting, runbooks and incident-response practices that improve reliability, recoverability and mean time to resolution.
• Design and build AI agents and intelligent automation tools that help research scientists and data engineers interact with the platform more effectively.
• Design and implement MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations that connect AI agents to platform data sources, tools and services.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI tools, frameworks and patterns into the platform's development workflows, where AI-assisted development or intelligent automation can accelerate delivery.
• Apply sufficient familiarity with modern data-platform patterns to collaborate with data engineering teams, including Airflow, Glue/Spark, Kafka/MSK and Lakehouse-oriented architectures.
• Apply platform engineering skills such as API design, service integration, automation, operational troubleshooting and reusable tooling to strengthen the reliability and usability of data-platform capabilities.
• Contribute to platform documentation and technical design proposals, ensuring AI integrations, MCP patterns and cross-cutting platform capabilities are well documented.
• Rotate into feature or platform squads as needed; this role is deliberately not siloed to a single domain.
• Design reusable tooling, APIs, service integrations, self-service workflows and automation that improve developer and user productivity.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related technical field.
• 6-10 years of professional experience in DevOps, platform engineering or infrastructure engineering, with demonstrated ownership of production systems.
• Strong hands-on Python proficiency for automation, APIs, AI tooling, scripting, operational workflows and platform integrations.
• Hands-on experience building, operating and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions, automated validation gates and deployment promotion workflows.
• Solid working knowledge of AWS, infrastructure-as-code, containerized workloads and Kubernetes/EKS-based runtime environments.
• Strong operational mindset across observability tools (such as Loki, Tempo or Grafana), logging, metrics, alerting, runbooks, incident response, root-cause analysis and reliability improvement.
• Practical curiosity or hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, MCP, tool integrations or AI-assisted automation.
• Experience writing unit tests, integration tests and automated test suites, with a bias toward building quality and validation into delivery workflows.
• Proven track record to independently identify problems worth solving and deliver practical, maintainable solutions with minimal guidance.
• Strong communication and customer fluency, with the ability to work across research scientists, data engineers, platform teams and technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow preferred).
• Familiarity with data transformation (DBT), distributed computing (Spark, Glue), data lakehouse concepts (Iceberg) or data quality frameworks (Great Expectations).
• Streaming technologies (Kafka, MSK), with understanding of event-driven architectures.
• Trino or similar distributed query engines.
• Java: ability to read, understand and contribute to existing Java-based platform services.
• AWS certifications (Cloud Practitioner, AI Practitioner, or higher).

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India.