The posting
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.
Enterprise AI Security Engineer
Role Overview
The Enterprise AI Security Engineer builds, operates, and improves the controls that make AI safe to use at Eli Lilly. Working with the Enterprise AI Security Advisor and senior engineers, this role turns AI security requirements into working guardrails, detections, telemetry, and assessments across commercial AI assistants and coding agents, internally built agents and integrations, models, and AI compute platforms.
The engineer tunes and operates inference-time guardrails, tests AI systems for issues such as prompt injection, sensitive data exposure, excessive permissions, and unsafe agent actions, builds visibility into AI usage and agent activity, and integrates AI security tooling with Lilly's cloud, endpoint, identity, and security operations platforms.
This is a hands-on engineering role in a highly regulated pharmaceutical environment, with direct exposure to how AI is adopted across a large enterprise. The position may be filled at the Sr. Engineer or Principal Engineer level depending on experience.
Key Responsibilities
Guardrail Engineering & Operations
• Implement, tune, and operate detection and policy content for enterprise AI guardrails (for example sensitive data and secrets detection, prompt-injection defenses, and tool-call policies) across AI assistants, coding agents, and internally built agents.
• Triage findings, classify true and false positives against an agreed rubric, and produce the evidence needed to move controls from monitoring to blocking with minimal user impact.
• Maintain runbooks, configuration as code, and test suites for guardrail rules and policies; validate changes before promotion to production.
• Participate in the operational cadence of the service, including regular tuning reviews, change management, and support rotations as needed.
AI Systems Assessment & Testing
• Assess AI applications, agents, integrations (including MCP servers and tool connectors), and third-party AI products to document what they can access and do, and where controls are needed.
• Execute test plans for prompt injection (direct and indirect), sensitive data exposure, excessive permissions, and unsafe agent actions; reproduce issues and write clear, actionable findings.
• Contribute to threat models and security acceptance criteria for AI systems using frameworks such as OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and MITRE ATLAS.
• Track remediation with owning teams and verify that fixes are effective.
Visibility, Detection & Response
• Build and maintain telemetry pipelines, analytics, and dashboards for AI usage and agent activity so teams can see where AI is used, what it can access, and whether controls are working.
• Develop detections and alerts for AI-specific events such as data exfiltration through AI tools, anomalous agent behavior, and unsafe tool use, and forward them to SIEM and SOAR platforms.
• Support security operations and insider-threat investigations involving AI tools by providing data, context, and analysis.
• Measure control effectiveness with agreed metrics (coverage, precision, time to detect, user impact) and report trends.
Platform Integration & Automation
• Integrate AI security tooling with cloud (AWS, Azure), endpoint, identity, data protection, and ticketing platforms through governed, authenticated APIs.
• Automate deployment, testing, and rollback of guardrail services and detection content using CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code; keep configurations version-controlled and auditable.
• Evaluate and pilot vendor and platform capabilities under the direction of senior engineers, documenting what they cover and where gaps remain.
• Apply secure engineering practices (least privilege, secrets management, logging) to the tooling the team builds and operates.
Collaboration & Continuous Learning
• Work directly with teams building AI applications and agents to help them apply security requirements and approved patterns.
• Contribute to documentation, standards, and reusable patterns; share findings with security operations, privacy, and platform engineering peers.
• Stay current on LLM and agent threats, vendor guardrail capabilities, and industry frameworks, and bring relevant practices back to the team.
• At the Principal Engineer (R3) level: lead small workstreams end to end, mentor less experienced engineers, and represent the team in cross-functional working sessions.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, or an IT related field.
- 2+ years of experience in security engineering, software engineering, cloud engineering, or security operations.
- 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:
- Proficiency in Python and scripting (Bash or PowerShell), with experience using REST APIs and working with structured data (JSON, SQL).
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) and of core security domains such as identity and access management, application security, data protection, or security monitoring.
- Hands-on familiarity with LLM-based applications, coding assistants, or agents, and an understanding of common LLM security issues such as prompt injection, data leakage, and excessive permissions.
- Experience with detection engineering, DLP, or rule tuning in a SIEM, EDR, or proxy/gateway platform.
- Experience building with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, or agent-to-tool protocols (MCP), and with AI evaluation or red-team tooling.
- Familiarity with OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and MITRE ATLAS.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code, containers, and CI/CD pipelines (for example Terraform or CloudFormation, Docker, GitHub Actions).
- Experience querying and analyzing data at scale (SQL, Athena, or similar) and building dashboards.
- Relevant certifications (for example Security+, AWS or Azure security, GIAC) or participation in CTF or AI red-team exercises.
- Ability to analyze data, write clear findings, and communicate technical issues to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- Attention to detail, sound judgment, and comfort working in a regulated environment with change control and audit requirements.
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
$66,000 - $158,400
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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