Designer 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.

Design Lead

Job Description

Organization Overview:

At Lilly, we serve an extraordinary purpose. We make a difference for people around the globe by discovering, developing, and delivering medicines that help them live longer, healthier, more active lives. Not only do we deliver breakthrough medications, but you also can count on us to develop creative solutions to support communities through philanthropy and volunteerism.

About the Organization

IT@Lilly builds and maintains capabilities using cutting edge technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates IT@Lilly is that we create new possibilities through tech to advance our purpose – creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds, so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver innovative solutions in every area of our business.

The Lilly UX team is an enterprise internal digital experience design service team that operates like an agency. We partner with teams around Lilly to create exceptional digital experiences. Our team delivers digital experience design, user experience research, and digital design evaluation with digital accessibility built into everything we make. We also host the Lilly Design System, a world-class design system we use to ensure our product are mobile friendly, accessible, and efficient to create.

Help us figure out how we can make our digital experiences better by generating insightful, powerful research findings!

Lilly is on an exciting journey to transform the technology at Lilly into a world-class technology organization within a Pharma company. Part of this journey is to become a digital product-based organization. As a result, there is a renewed focus on creating both a world class User Centred Design capability to deliver an exciting portfolio of patient and employee facing solutions to power our business. We need your help to understand just how we are going to do that.

What You’ll Be Doing:

You’ll be joining our Incubation Lab, a design and technology team re-imagining our approach to human-centered design innovation and rapid concept development at Lilly. We define, envision and shape differentiated customer experiences that empower individuals to live their best lives, as unencumbered by their condition as possible.

As a Design Lead in our Incubation Lab you'll collaborate with teams across the organization to define big bets and transformative experiences by contributing high-quality visual assets and ideas to create exceptional identities and interfaces. Your design expertise will showcase the power of possible experiences by making complex abstract ideas simple and tangible. 

  

Your passion and experience for design craft and digital products will help elevate our quality and ensure that the little details add up to an exceptional customer experience, while our innovation practice thinks big.  Through it all, the Design Lead will contribute creativity in ways that shape culture, ensuring our Incubation practice is steeped in good ideas and good energy. 

How You’ll Succeed:

• Deliver excellence by upholding a high bar for design craft, strategic thinking, and execution across all initiatives.
• Define the mood, tone, look, and feel that position future products and services—and translate that direction into high-quality prototypes that are intuitive, elegant, and a joy to use.
• Elevate and maintain our visual design standard through hands-on contribution across a wide range of outputs and mediums, from consumer-facing apps to visually compelling patient-journey storytelling.
• Contribute thought leadership and a strategic design perspective to help the organization stay ahead of evolving best practices, trends, and emerging technologies.
• Present and persuasively communicate design rationale to stakeholders at all levels, including internal partners and external vendors.
• Craft engaging and innovative interfaces that balance strong aesthetics with clarity and usability across platforms such as web, mobile, kiosk, and more.
• Develop strong visual identities, directions, and early-stage experiences from scratch—sparking excitement, alignment, and commitment around new products and features.
• Connect teams and stakeholders to possible futures through design artifacts at all fidelities, including narrative decks, paper sketches, conceptual prototypes, and polished interfaces.

 
What You Should Bring: 

• Deep attention to detail and a passion for every aspect of visual storytelling, including typography, motion, copy, and art direction.
• Strong understanding of component-based design systems, with the judgment to know when to follow established patterns and when to push boundaries.
• A growth-minded, collaborative approach that contributes to a culture of critique, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
• Demonstrated executive accountability, flexibility, and initiative—with the ability to prioritize effectively and deliver high-quality work in dynamic environments.

Your Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS in Graphic Design, User Experience, Visual Communication, Digital Media, or a related field—or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on design experience in fast-paced environments.
• Exceptional portfolio spanning multiple mediums with an emphasis on interface or screen-based experiences.
• Proficiency with modern design tools, including Figma and Adobe Creative Suite.
• Qualified candidates must be legally authorized to be employed in the United States. Lilly does not anticipate providing sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B or TN status) for this employment position.

Additional Skills/Preferences:

• Deep command of foundational design principles, including typography, grid, composition, and color.
• Proven track record of delivering exceptional work and contributing to great products, with skills in mentorship, storytelling, presenting, and visual communication.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to simplify complex ideas for diverse audiences.
• A collaborative and optimistic spirit—able to navigate challenges while maintaining joy, empathy, curiosity, and a sense of fun in the craft.
• Experience working in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, or other highly regulated industries is a plus.
• Familiarity with modern development processes and an understanding of what’s possible with contemporary front-end libraries and frameworks.

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 Network, Black Employees at Lilly, Chinese Culture Network, Japanese International Leadership Network (JILN), Lilly India Network, Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), PRIDE (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN), Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL), enAble (for people with disabilities). Learn more about all of our groups.

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location.  The anticipated wage for this position is

$126,000 - $246,400

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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