Associate Director - Platform Engineering

At Elanco (NYSE: ELAN) – it all starts with animals!

As a global leader in animal health, we are dedicated to innovation and delivering products and services to prevent and treat disease in farm animals and pets. We’re driven by our vision of ‘Food and Companionship Enriching Life’ and our approach to sustainability – the Elanco Healthy Purpose™ – to advance the health of animals, people, the planet and our enterprise.

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!

Software Engineering and Platforms - Job Description 

Role Title: Associate Director – Platform Engineering 

Location: IAC 

Team: Software Engineering and Platforms 

Supervisor: IT Engineering Director – Platform Engineering 

Who we are: 
 

Elanco is a global animal health company that develops and delivers products and services to prevent and treat diseases in farm animals and pets. We are driven by our vision of food and companionship enriching life and our Elanco Healthy Purpose™ CSR framework. We are committed to innovation, diversity and inclusion, and environmental sustainability. 

Position Description:  

Historically, the role of IT has been to provide a reliable ecosystem to run the business, drive efficiencies and reduce costs. These areas remain integral, however, driven by the quickening pace of innovation, IT must evolve, proactively partnering with the business to enable new digital business models that power new types of customer engagement. 

At Elanco, our engineer roles bring adaptive set of skills focused on software engineering covering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Commercial-of-the-Shelf (CotS) and/or Custom Developed applications. Working closely with Software Engineering team we are responding to the needs of our customers while building reliable, secure and efficient software. Architects helping define strong reference architectures that result in secure, scalable applications that achieve the desired business outcome. 

We are looking for an Associate Engineering Director to help with the expansion of our enterprise engineering function. The role will be responsible for team leadership, technical direction, hiring and coaching of our engineers across the solution ops space located in our India Alliance Centre. 

We are looking for a highly motivated individual, with an innovative mindset and a willingness to drive tangible outcomes. The individual must be able to partner with Software Engineering and Platforms leadership team to build an engineering strategy, covering hiring, training and management of staff and support staff across the organisation. 

Responsibilities: 

Engineering 

• Join the Engineering lead team setting team vision and direction including strategy, hiring, onboarding and continuous technical management. 

• Hire, build and manage a high-performing Platform engineering team that follows agile methodologies and best practices. 

• Carry out all elements of employee supervision, such as performance management, development coaching, learning plan oversight, task assignment and succession management. 

• Own the establishment of required capabilities and skills, anticipate future needs, staff to needs, and continuously work to develop people and the organization. 

• Coach engineers helping to develop technical skills find opportunities across engineering to build a good engineering competency across the organisation. 

• Engage across our enterprise web platform, development toolchain, automation, and our business discovery capabilities to help strategize and align technical direction. 

• Drive good Engineering practices across the teams partnering with our process engineer to drive strong engineering discipline across the engineering organisation. 

• Identify opportunities to modernize and optimize the IT ecosystem. 

• Support the process to define, embed and scale Platform Eengineering, including governance, processes, etc. 

• Drive new ways of working to engage our engineering team (e.g leading hackathons). 

• Ensure good operational support processes for key engineering products supported by the team including dashboards, security products, web products. 

• Take ownership of defining and driving the technical strategy for Platform engineering projects. 

• Align with Product roadmaps and ensure technical decisions support business priorities 

• Institutionalize engineering innovation by setting up frameworks to operationalize successful prototypes, turning them into scalable solutions. 

Stakeholder Engagement 

• Influence application modernisation including languages and frameworks utilised across custom built applications to ensure our applications remain modern, efficient, and well supported. 

• Identify opportunities to minimise operational effort required to run SaaS, COTs applications, partner with teams to further challenge vendor partners in the capabilities provided. 

• Lead cross-functional collaboration between engineering, architecture, Data, Cloud Ops and product teams to enable cohesive delivery of solutions. 

• Drive consensus on technical solutions across teams and regions.  

• Partner with leadership to influence technology roadmaps, aligning technical outcomes with business KPIs and long-term vision. 

• Act as a primary technical advisor in stakeholder discussions, bridging technical complexity and business value. 

• Establish a strong partnership with Information Security, working with our application reliability engineering to identify opportunities and mitigate risks in our application estate. 

Community 

• Proactively engage with the IT community (internally and externally) across multiple channels, looking to share, represent, educate and inspire. 

• Evangelise Elanco’s technical products, helping upskill other areas of the business on how to utilise our web technologies appropriately. 

• Serve as a coach for IT Analysts/Engineers to advance individuals’ technical acumen. 

• Actively build and stay abreast of emerging technology directions (specifically application architecture), guiding IT and the Business on how to interpret and best leverage emerging technologies.  

• Mentor and develop Senior Engineers and Engineers, nurturing the next generation of leaders.  

• Champion knowledge-sharing sessions (e.g., tech talks, lunch & learns) to elevate technical acumen across the organization. 

Innovation 

• Partner to drive a DevSecOps culture across the organisation.  

• Establish measurable success metrics (KPIs) for innovation initiatives, ensuring value delivery aligns with business outcomes. 

• Identify everyday opportunities to drive more efficiency through the identification of repeatable process using of automation techniques. 

• Use modern product approaches to influence and shape the business through partnership with BRM (Business Relationship Management) utilising modern product approaches such as rapid prototyping and embedding a ‘show them, don’t tell them’ culture. 

• Help with the stand up and creation of an innovation rapid response engineering squad to facilitate ideation and business idea shaping around technology products and investments. 

Basic Qualifications:  

• At least 5+ years of experience in leading and managing engineering teams. 

• Excellent communication skills. Exhibits excellent verbal and written communication skills, ensuring clear and consistent interaction with team members, stakeholders, and upper management.
• Demonstrates effective leadership by inspiring and guiding team members, fostering a collaborative environment, and handling conflicts constructively.
• Possesses strong analytical skills to identify issues and opportunities, make informed decisions, and implement solutions that align with the team’s goals and organizational objectives.
• Technical coach skills beneficial  
• Strong understanding of Observability, previous experience with SRE beneficial.

• Previous hands-on development experience preferred including: 

• Expertise in cloud-based data platforms and services, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP. 

• Experience working within a “DevSecOps” culture, including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), etc. 

• Demonstrated influence and communication skills across all levels of IT and third parties. 

• Strong organizational and communications skills with multiple examples of being able to convey complex technical topics, that resulted in a definitive direction. 

• Infrastructure experience or appreciation desirable.  

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills 

• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced and dynamic environment. 

Education Requirements: Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology. 

Other Information:
Occasional travel may be required. 
Working across time zones.

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