At Elanco (NYSE: ELAN) – it all starts with animals!
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At Elanco, we pride ourselves on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment. We believe that diversity is the driving force behind innovation, creativity, and overall business success. Here, you’ll be part of a company that values and champions new ways of thinking, work with dynamic individuals, and acquire new skills and experiences that will propel your career to new heights.
Making animals’ lives better makes life better – join our team today!
Your role: Solution Architect
Elanco IT is evolving to meet the quickening pace of innovation, proactively partnering to create new value through innovative digital products, services, and insights for both internal business partners and external customers.
As a Solution Architect supporting our Platform Engineering teams, you will provide technical thought leadership and contribute to the business vision by shaping the platforms, standards, and engineering foundations that enable teams to deliver securely, reliably, and at speed. You will have the autonomy to make key design decisions and influence technology investments and product roadmaps, while helping ensure our engineering ecosystem is positioned to support both current delivery needs and Elanco’s future AI engineering agenda.
In this role, you will partner closely with Product Managers, Product Designers, Principal Engineers, Solution Architects, and engineering teams to ensure the holistic direction of our engineering platforms is aligned to the most important developer pain points and business outcomes. You will help translate enterprise architecture into practical engineering standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, and self-service capabilities that teams can adopt with confidence.
Your Responsibilities:
To be successful, you should be a highly motivated individual with an innovative and strategic mindset, a bias for action, proactive communication skills, and the ability to form and communicate a strong perspective. You must be able to explain complex technical topics to a wide range of stakeholders, lift the technical competency of teams, collaborate with internal and external partners, ensure alignment with architectural principles and standards, and drive tangible engineering and business outcomes.
Platform Strategy and Developer Experience
Contribute to the technical strategic vision and roadmap for platform engineering capabilities that support both software engineering and data engineering teams.
Define and maintain a holistic view of Elanco’s engineering platform landscape, identifying opportunities to simplify, standardize, and scale core developer foundations.
Improve the developer experience by identifying friction in the engineering lifecycle and designing better workflows, tooling, and self-service capabilities across build, test, deploy, operate, and observe.
Create and evolve paved roads, reusable reference architectures, golden paths, templates, and engineering patterns that help teams deliver in a more consistent and efficient way.
Translate enterprise architecture principles into actionable engineering guidance that teams can adopt through codified standards, automation, and platform capabilities.
Partner with engineering teams to move architectural designs to a ready-to-build state, ensuring the path from concept to implementation is clear and scalable.
Standards, Codification & Engineering Excellence
Drive stronger engineering standards across the organization, with a focus on codifying best practices into tooling, pipelines, templates, policies, and reusable platform components.
Support the design and implementation of engineering foundations for example, but not exclusive; CI/CD, test automation, API standards, observability, secrets management, environment consistency, and policy/compliance guardrails.
Promote metric-driven engineering by helping define and embed measures that show whether platform investments are improving developer productivity, quality, reliability, and adoption.
Identify and implement opportunities to automate manual processes, reduce cognitive load for engineers, and improve the reliability and repeatability of delivery workflows.
Contribute directly to architecture standards and patterns that product teams can use to implement solutions appropriately and consistently.
AI Ready Engineering
Support Elanco’s AI engineering agenda by ensuring developer foundations are designed to enable engineers to work effectively with AI now and in the future.
Assess and shape platform capabilities required for AI-assisted engineering, such as secure code generation workflows, standardized repositories and documentation patterns, high-quality pipelines, traceability, guardrails, and reusable integration patterns.
Partner across software, data, and AI engineering to ensure platform decisions support future needs in areas such as data accessibility, experimentation, automation, model-enabled workflows, and safe use of AI in engineering.
Apply emerging technology trends, including AI and cloud-native practices, to practical engineering problems where they create measurable value.
Partnership & Stakeholder Engagement
Work closely with Product Management to identify the most important developer pain points and prioritize platform investments that create the greatest value for engineering teams and the business.
Support discovery and pre-discovery activities by helping validate technical direction, shape implementation options, and identify where shared platform capabilities can accelerate delivery or reduce complexity.
Help articulate the business case for platform engineering investments by connecting technical improvements to delivery speed, quality, reuse, risk reduction, and developer effectiveness.
Partner with Product Managers in business discussions to clearly explain how platform strategy, standards, and developer enablement support business outcomes.
Act as the bridge between principal engineering, enterprise and solution architecture and how we develop on the ground, ensuring standards are not only defined but adopted across engineering teams.
What You Need to Succeed (minimum qualifications):
B.S. in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
7+ years of experience in architecting and delivering enterprise technology solutions, with meaningful experience across software platforms, developer tooling, or engineering enablement.
Strong technical background from a hands-on engineering path, with experience spanning architecture, software engineering, platform engineering, and/or data engineering.
Experience working with modern architecture and engineering methodologies, such as service-oriented architecture, API-centric design, cloud-native patterns, CI/CD, DevSecOps, test automation, infrastructure/platform automation, and reusable engineering patterns.
Experience designing and improving developer-facing platforms, standards, or engineering foundations that reduce friction and increase consistency across teams.
Experience working across both application/software engineering and data engineering/platform concerns, with an appreciation for how shared foundations can support both disciplines.
Experience in Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, Internal developer platforms or productivity programs.
Experience with cloud platforms, with a preference toward Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud.
Strong organizational, communication, and leadership skills, with clear examples of conveying complex technical topics in a way that drove alignment and decision-making.
Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, work cross-functionally, and translate ambitious ideas into scalable platform capabilities.
What will give you a competitive edge (preferred qualifications):
Familiarity with infrastructure considerations (networking, hosting, security, etc.) in enabling on-premise and cloud IT solutions.
Experience working in a regulated industry such as life sciences or equivalent.
Solution architecture certifications for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
Experience working in a product operating model delivering architecture capability across product.
Additional Information:
Travel: 0-10%
Location: Hook, UK - Hybrid Work Environment
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Elanco we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive work environment. If you think you might be a good fit for a role but don't necessarily meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply. You may be the right candidate for this role or other roles!
Elanco is an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer and 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
Elanco may use automated tools, including AI, to support parts of our recruitment process, such as reviewing applications against job‑related criteria and/or transferrable skills. These tools help ensure a consistent, structured evaluation, but they do not make hiring decisions. All decisions involve a human reviewer. For more information on how we handle personal data, please see our Elanco Workforce Privacy Notice.