Lilly Posted September 12, 2026

Senior Medical Director – Accelerated R&D Leadership Program

Indianapolis, Indiana, United States of America FULL_TIME
Medical Affairs Director
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Lilly is the source of truth for this posting and owns the application process. We surface normalized context and market comparison you won't find on the original listing.

About this opportunity

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.

Responsibilities

Are you seeking a career where your passion for medicine or scientific discovery positions you to lead teams delivering new medicines to patients around the world? Lilly is pursuing physicians and scientists who are innovative thinkers and have an entrepreneurial mindset. Lilly's Accelerated R&D Leadership Program will enable you to have meaningful experiences across the drug development-continuum. You'll work across multiple cross-functional areas to make meaningful strategic and innovative contributions while building strong connections across Lilly. As a program participant, we will invest in your development as a leader within Lilly – a leading medicine company -and in leading others to prepare you for future leadership opportunities that provide enterprise-wide influence and the ability to deliver on important business objectives.

Sound interesting to you? Read on for additional benefits of the accelerated R&D leadership program:

A Purposeful Career, bringing together people who discover and deliver life-changing medicines that improve peoples' lives around the world

An Opportunity for Growth, providing opportunities for you to develop and advance professionally, including building fluency in emerging AI-enabled drug development tools and platforms

An Inclusive Culture, committed to uniting individuals across cultures, and developing a comfortable, connected environment that values diverse thought

In this program, you will not only learn, develop and grow as an influential R&D leader, but you will also have the opportunity to deliver meaningful results through challenging, business-critical projects and assignments spanning across multiple functions.

This program is designed to provide you with Senior Leadership mentorship, peer coaching, leadership development training, and experiences in key areas of drug development over a two-year period. Participants will rotate and build expertise in a wide range of functions spanning biopharmaceutical drug development, portfolio strategy, and commercialization.

Experiences may include:

Business Development

Clinical Pharmacology

Medical Affairs

Global Patient Safety

Regulatory

Decision Sciences

Pricing, Reimbursement, & Access

Global Health Outcomes & Real World Evidence

Clinical Development

Clinical Design

New Product Planning

Portfolio Strategy

Program Management

AI Strategy & Innovation

Across all rotations, participants are expected to leverage AI-powered tools and platforms to enhance decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and generate novel insights. This includes working with generative AI applications, predictive modeling outputs, and AI-enabled data analysis in partnership with Lilly's data science teams.

With regular access to coaching and mentorship from top Lilly leaders, upon completion of this program you may pursue a variety of key R&D leadership roles within Lilly.

We're Looking For

Highly motivated and driven physician/scientist leaders with a passion for combining the science of medicine with business strategy and innovation

Individuals with integrity, excellence, and respect for people

Individuals who want to expand their ability to make a difference in someone else's life

Leaders who embrace emerging technologies as tools to accelerate scientific discovery and improve patient outcomes

Basic Qualifications

Broad work experience that includes 3–5 years in any of the following: Clinical

Academic or research

Consulting firm

Venture capital and/or small bio-tech

Medical Doctor must be board eligible or certified in a medical specialty relevant to the role or have completed the comparable level of post-medical school clinical training relevant to the country of hiring. U.S. trained physicians must have achieved board eligibility or certification. Foreign medical graduates in U.S. based jobs, who are not U.S. board eligible or certified may be hired directly for employment in the U.S. at the discretion of the Chief Medical Officer.

Non-U.S. trained physicians must have completed education and training at a medical school that meets the requirements of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME). For the recognized list of foreign medical schools and the disapproved list, see http://www.in.gov/pla/professions/medical-physicians-and-osteopathic-physicians-home/medical-licensing-information/

Additional Skills/Preferences

MBA or non-MBA with experiences in VC, consulting, small biotech, drug development, investment banking.

Unique and ambitious business leadership

Entrepreneurial mindset and innovative thinker

Demonstrated leadership

Strong learning agility, including ability to create and implement new ideas

Track record of significant contributions to the advancement of science (through publication record, etc.)

Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and their application in drug development or clinical research

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

$219,000 - $321,200

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.

#WeAreLilly

Job details

Seniority
Director
Function
Medical Affairs
Therapeutic area
Not listed
Location
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States of America
Employment type
FULL_TIME

How this role compares

Computed from every other active Medical Affairs role in our database, not just this employer's listings.

We currently track 254 comparable Director Medical Affairs roles across 47 biopharma companies.

254Comparable roles tracked
240Currently active
47Companies hiring similar roles
20Countries represented

Salary context

130 of 254 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)

Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.

This roleSubject $219,000/yr – $321,200/yr
Lowest disclosed · Principal Strategic Medical Writer · AbbVie $109,500/yr – $208,500/yr
Highest disclosed · Sr Medical Director (Heme Oncology) (Boston, US) · Servier $298/hr – $350/hr (≈ $619,840–$728,000/yr)
Peer group range $159,000 – $673,920 (median $264,000)

Where these roles are based

Top locations among the 254 comparable roles

United States194
United Kingdom15
Switzerland8
China's Mainland8
Japan6
Spain4

+ 14 more countries

Seniority mix

254 of 254 peers have a known seniority level

Director225
Senior Director22
Principal7

Therapeutic area mix

112 of 254 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden

Oncology53
Neuroscience14
Immunology10
Respiratory8
Cardiovascular / CVRM7
Vaccines & Infectious Disease6
Rare Disease6
Dermatology & Aesthetics5
Ophthalmology2
Gastroenterology1

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The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.

60%similar
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Notify me about similar jobs

Get an email when we spot other openings like this one – same job function, comparable seniority, roles you'd actually want to see.

How we calculate "similar"

No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.

Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.

60%
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Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
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Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
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Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
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Scientific Director / Senior Medical Director, Medical Affairs - Global Oncology Pipeline (Prostate Cancer)
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Function Therapeutic area Seniority Country
Unmatched or unknown dimensions score exactly the same: 0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.