Director - Engineering Operations

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!

Your Role:

As lead for Engineering Operations, you will be responsible for driving our promise to deliver and maintain secure, reliable and efficient solutions. Your role will be pivotal in transforming our current operational approaches to suit a modern-day Engineering organization, embracing the concepts of DevSecOps. 

In partnership with Engineering and Product Management, you will define and implement a holistic operational strategy that promotes consistency across product teams. This includes the required foundational tool chain, with an emphasis on the automation of common operational tasks (detection, remediation, etc.)

Finally, you will manage key service providers and external partners, ensuring their teams are a natural extension of Engineering, with standardized processes that prioritize flexibility and scale.

Your Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership

• Deliver an ambitious vision for a modern approach to application (custom and SaaS) and data operations.  Moving from reactive to proactive and self-healing. 
• Seek input across IT and Business product teams taking operational goals and translating them into visions and strategies that drive to a modern operations approach.
• Champion the move to DevSecOps and SRE fostering a culture of collaboration, automation and continuous improvement between development and operations teams.
• Embed modernization and lifecycle management into product teams monitoring adherence to reduction in tech debt.

Application & Data support services

• Own our relationship with third parties focusing on stabilization of our operational estate.
• Continually review our approaches to running applications and modernize in line with organizational direction with a view to scalability, skillset and cost.
• Work with product teams to adopt incident management processes defined by TechOps and ensure we do this consistently.
• Define foundational service principles ensuring Engineering Product Teams are providing the right capabilities to scale that can be consumed by business product teams.
• Manage the engagement with service providers and external partners, including expectations, processes and metrics (Service Level Agreements, etc.)
• Maintain a healthy working relationship with service providers and external partners, promoting a “one team” mentality, where external resources are embedded as part of the Elanco engineering culture.

Operational Oversight and Governance

• Partner with our engineering product teams to ensure we have the right tools embedded and matured to help service our operational needs.
• Implement governance frameworks that ensure consistency, risk management, and adherence to compliance standards.
• Continually review operational and governance processes to improve efficiency, reduce costs and enhance service quality.
• Manage stakeholders across Elanco with a clear communication strategy.

What you need to succeed (minimum qualifications):

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology (IT).
• Required Experience: Cloud platforms including Azure, GCP. A proven track record of 10+ years managing operational teams, processes within custom software, data and SaaS environments.
• Experience managing successful managed partner agreements.
• Strong experience with agile methodologies, DevSecOps practices, and modern software engineering frameworks.

What will give you the competitive edge (preferred qualifications):

• ITIL experience an advantage.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence across cross-functional teams.
• A deep commitment to technical excellence 
• Experience embedding and scaling the product-first principles as defined by the Product Operating Model would be highly advantageous.

Additional Information: 

• Location: Global Elanco Headquarters - Greenfield, IN - Hybrid Work Environment
• Occasional travel may be required.

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 Benefits and Perks:

We offer a comprehensive benefits package focusing on financial, physical, and mental well-being while encouraging our employees to pursue our purpose! Some highlights include:

• Multiple relocation packages
• Two weeklong shutdowns (mid-summer and year-end) in the US (in addition to PTO)
• 8-week parental leave
• 9 Employee Resource Groups
• Annual bonus offering
• Flexible work arrangements
• Up to 6% 401K matching

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