Director - Infrastructure Operations Lead

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.

Level: M2

Supervisor: Harsh Chadha, Sr. Director IT– Lilly Hyderabad

About the Team:

The Hyderabad Infrastructure Operations Lead is responsible for leading the Digital Core Infrastructure operations teams spanning 2 shifts based in Hyderabad, India. This strategic leader shares responsibility for the governance and operational excellence of the enterprise InfraOPS with their global counterparts. This role oversees 2 of the 3 global operations teams of infrastructure platforms (Servers, Storage, Cloud Ops) to enhance service delivery, automation, and efficiency across the organization.

The ideal candidate will lead key operations transformation initiatives, driving related service management processes, while ensuring alignment with business goals, industry best practices, and emerging technologies, like AI and Automation. They will collaborate with cross-functional teams, lead innovation efforts, and manage vendor relationships to optimize platform performance and scalability. Additionally, they will have a strong background in Infrastructure, platform operations, hyperscale cloud, leading high performing global teams, and a proven track record of managing large-scale service delivery. These skills will enable improved user efficiency and experience and help support the broader Company purpose of making life better for people around the world.

What you’ll be doing:

As the leader of the Hyderabad Infrastructure Operations Team, you’ll be operating as a highly effective People, Transformation, and Relationship Leader. You will have the desire and proven ability to cut through ambiguity and re-imagine how services should be established and managed to ensure the highest levels of efficiency.

You will be a respected and robust partner who feels obligated to focus on enterprise value-based outcomes – one that can establish new enterprise capabilities through engagement with cross functional partners and vendors whilst minimizing technical dept.

Key Responsibilities:

Hyderabad Infrastructure Operations Team Leadership

• Be a Leader: Lead multiple teams with multiple first line leaders focused on the ongoing operational support of Lilly’s global Technology infrastructure.
• Be Bold: You will drive Infrastructure Operations to never have to fix the same problem twice through adoption of AI OPS, Event Driven Automation, and robust Observability.
• Be Fast: You will accelerate initiatives in areas such as: Infrastructure AI OPS automation, cloud IaaS management, and cloud infrastructure as code to enable critical business projects.
• Be Proactive: You will have groundbreaking opportunities to transform our operations processes using proactive, predictive, and automated AI & Observability capabilities.
• Be Your Best: You will bring high learning agility and Infrastructure operations / engineering skills to help us enable the Lilly Technology strategy, identify tech opportunities, and accelerate our AI OPS journey.

Incident and Change Leadership

• Follow ITIL-based incident, problem, and change management processes using ServiceNow.
• Manage incident resolution and root cause analysis for critical server issues.
• Oversee change management processes, ensuring minimal impact to production environments.
• Incident, Change and Request Management: Participate in incident response and root cause analysis to prevent recurrences, be available on-call as needed, and participate in an on-call schedule. Able to work off-hours and weekends if needed for any major incidents/critical activities. Work under pressure to guide teams in resolving incidents quickly. Oversee changes to all infrastructure teams, ensuring adherence to processes with minimal production impact.
• Partner with Tech@Lilly, Cyber, Quality, Procurement, and other partner organizations to ensure high Shared Consciousness in transformation roadmaps

Other responsibilities

• Partner with cross functional group of architects, technologists, and service area leadership to establish and execute against an ongoing engineering excellence program focusing on continuous improvement
• Demonstrate the ability to drive, lead and coach others, and influence others outside their sphere of influence.
• Manage a team - responsible for staff performance evaluations and management (e.g., disciplinary); training and development; and have authority to hire.
• Act as a member of the Lilly Hyderabad T@L Lead Team to ensure governance, process and compliance consistency across the various Lilly Hyderabad T@L service areas.
• Provide coaching and mentorship to others within the function to enhance the team’s ongoing technical development and understanding of technologies, services, quality and security compliance standards, and methodologies.
• Identify and hire talent to foster innovation and excellence.
• Proven experience in assessing business value, risk mitigation, cost optimization, and return on investment.
• Deliver results based upon annual goals, department goals and management requests.
• Develop department budget, performance standards, and schedules.
• Establish operating policies and procedures.
• Implement initiatives for continuous improvement and ideas for positive disruption

Basic Qualifications:

• A bachelor's degree in an IT subject area (computer science, information systems, etc.) or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience in IT Infrastructure operations, with a strong focus on server & storage platforms (e.g., Windows Server, Linux, Storage & Backups, Virtualization)
• Proven leadership experience managing or working on global/diverse teams
• Strong knowledge of ITIL frameworks, service operations, and process improvement methodologies.
• Demonstrated leadership, influence, communication, presentation, and facilitation skills.
• Demonstrated strong partnership skills and influence with business partners inside business unit context.
• Demonstrated influence and communication skills across all levels of IT.
• Strong organizational and communication skills with multiple examples of being able to convey complex ideas and thoughts in manners that resulted in definitive directions and results.
• Strong negotiation skills.
• Deep vendor management experience.
• Proactive, demonstrated ability to challenge the status quo and strong ability to drive peers and above to timely decisions.
• A high level of intellectual curiosity, external perspective, technical aptitude and innovation interest.
• Demonstrated experience in service transformation with a focus on people, process, and technology.
• Experienced in delivering and sustaining solutions throughout software development lifecycle: design, engineering, construct, testing, deployment, and support of software solutions, platforms, services, and capabilities.
• Demonstrated ownership of sustainable capabilities and services within the budget, timeline, and scope constraints.
• Demonstrated business and technical acumen through interactions with key business and IT leadership.

Additional Skills / Preferences:

• Master’s degree in IT subject area (computer science, information systems, etc.).
• Basic understanding of cloud technologies (Azure, AWS) and hybrid cloud environments.
• Proficient in utilizing monitoring tools such as Splunk or similar platforms.
• System Maintenance and Monitoring: Ensure the stability, performance, and security of Linux/Windows/Cloud-based/Virtualization/Storage systems. Monitor system health, troubleshoot issues, and implement necessary fixes.
• Customer Support: Provide timely and effective support to customers on an as-needed basis. Address and resolve technical issues, ensuring minimal disruption to services.
• Experience with Agile and DevOps methodologies

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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