At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work - but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.
Organization Overview
Lilly Catalyze360 is a comprehensive approach to enabling the early-stage biotech ecosystem by democratizing access to infrastructure, expertise, and resources. Through its interconnected pillars - Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, Lilly ExploR&D, and Lilly TuneLab - Catalyze360 strategically removes barriers that traditionally block bold science from becoming life-changing medicines, providing biotechs with flexible combinations of capital, physical lab space, R&D capabilities, AI/ML tools, and decades of enterprise learning.
Lilly TuneLab is an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) platform that provides biotech companies access to drug discovery models trained on years of Lilly’s research data. Lilly estimates that this first release of AI models includes proprietary data obtained at a cost of over $1 billion, representing one of the industry’s most valuable datasets used to train an AI system available to biotechnology companies. By integrating advanced in silico modelling and federated learning, we connect pioneering machine learning algorithms, substantial computational power, exclusive datasets, and Lilly’s domain-specific knowledge to drive innovation in drug discovery and facilitate access to optimal therapies for patients.
Job Summary
TuneLab has powerful underlying AI models and point solutions. The job now is to turn them into something a biotech startup can actually use: a coherent workflow, a clean product experience, and a SaaS offering that scales.
We’re looking for a founding Product Designer to own how the product works and feels for external biotech partners. The primary focus is the problem space: who we’re building for, what they actually need, where existing tools fall short, and what’s worth building. The secondary focus is execution - including a design system that accelerates the team rather than becoming a project of its own.
At this stage, the biggest risk isn’t building too slowly. It’s building the wrong thing. Your job is to reduce that risk - live close to users, sharpen what’s worth building, and put design in front of engineering so we don’t commit resources to the wrong problems.
There’s no design org above you and no design system to inherit. You set the design bar. You’re the senior designer in the room.
You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with product, engineering, and data science, and report to the Catalyze360 Head of AI Platform and Products.
Key Responsibilities
Clarify the problem space
- Live close to biotech users. Learn their workflows, their pain, and the gap between what the AI can do and what they actually need.
- Define - and keep sharpening - who we’re building for, what they’re trying to do, and where existing tools fall short.
- Run lightweight discovery: interviews, prototypes, working sessions. Test what’s worth building before engineering commits.
- Translate findings into clear product direction. The team should leave a discovery cycle knowing what to build next and why.
- Be the strongest user voice on the team. Push back when the spec is wrong.
Design the product
- Own how the product works and feels - flow, interaction, and visual craft.
- Ship working design. You sweat the empty states and the error states; you don’t hand off pixels and walk.
- Build the design system that lets a small team move fast. Opinionated where it pays, lightweight where it doesn’t.
- Pair tightly with engineering. Prototype in code or close to it when that gets the answer faster than a Figma file.
Lift the team
- Mentor designers and design-adjacent peers as the team grows. Make them better at the job, not just better at this product.
- Partner with the Engineering Manager and product on hiring as the team expands. You sell the role and you hold the bar.
- Set the practice - how we research, how we critique, how we ship. What you do becomes the team norm.
Operate effectively inside a large company
- Navigate enterprise infrastructure, security, and compliance requirements without disrupting development progress.
- Work with Lilly’s internal capabilities and partners to leverage what already exists rather than rebuild it.
- Represent design in conversations with external biotech partners when it matters. You can speak credibly to a head of computational biology, a product lead, or a CTO on the other side.
Minimum Requirements
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, or a related field.
- 8+ years as a product designer, with a track record of shipping software that real external customers used and relied on.
- Demonstrated experience operating as a senior or staff designer on a small team - not just as a senior designer on a large one.
- Portfolio that shows your work end-to-end – from framing the problem to shipping the craft.
Additional Skills/Preferences
Design craft
- Strong product design fundamentals across interaction, information design, and visual craft. You have an opinion about each layer.
- You take a fuzzy problem from research to flow to ship-quality interface without losing the thread.
- You build design systems that earn their keep. They accelerate the team; they don’t become the project.
- You can hold a technical conversation with engineers - about feasibility, tradeoffs, and what’s worth building.
Discovery instincts
- You know how to find the real problem. You’re as comfortable running a customer interview as a critique.
- You ask “what problem are we solving?” before “how do we design it?”
- You bring a point of view to discovery, not just data. You synthesize what you hear into a direction the team can act on.
- You can sit with ambiguity long enough to understand a problem, without letting it drag.
Startup mentality
- You’ve worked in environments where the roadmap wasn’t fully defined and the team was small, and you thrived.
- You create structure and process when needed, but you know when to skip it.
- You take ownership broadly. If something isn’t working, you fix it rather than wait for someone else to.
- Startup experience matters here more than big-tech tenure.
Tools and methods
- Hands-on with AI tools in your design work - prompting, prototyping with code or AI assistance, pulling LLMs into research synthesis.
- You bring new tools and methods into the team rather than waiting for them to arrive. Your toolkit isn’t fixed.
- You stay curious about AI/ML capabilities themselves - what the models can do, where they’re heading - and that curiosity shows up in your design work.
How you lead
- You lead with judgment. You don’t need a senior title to set direction.
- Low ego, high standards. You’ll learn from someone who knows the area better, and you’ll push back firmly when you don’t agree.
- You communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences.
Additional Preferences
- Experience in life sciences, pharma, biotech, or health tech - especially if you’ve designed for scientists, researchers, or clinicians.
- Background designing B2B SaaS or developer tools.
- Prior experience at a startup, or as an early designer in an internal startup within a larger company.
- Experience as a founding designer, or as one of the first designers on a product that found users.
Why This Role
Lilly has built genuinely differentiated AI capabilities for drug discovery. The gap is product: turning that science into something a biotech startup can access, onboard, and build with. That’s what this team is about.
As the founding designer, you’ll have unusual leverage. You’ll have real ownership, a short decision chain, and work that matters. The product you help shape can affect how medicines get discovered and developed. That’s not a line in a pitch deck - it’s the actual job.
Additional Information
- Lilly may provide support for or sponsor work authorization or visas for this role for internal applicants only.
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 is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.
Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia (AMECA), Black Employees at Lilly (BE@Lilly), Chinese Culture Network (CCN), EnAble, Evolve, Lilly Indian Network (LIN), Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), Pride (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN) and Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL).
Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is
$180,000 - $275,000
Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a 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; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly’s compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.
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