Lead Engineer – Enterprise AI

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!

Location: UK, Hook (Hybrid)

Team: Software Engineering & Platforms

Supervisor: IT Engineering Director

Career Progression: Engineering, Architecture, Analyst

Over the past 4 years Elanco IT has been on an incredibly exciting journey. Separating from our parent company and standing up on our own gave us a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a modern technology stack free of the burden of large-scale technical debt. We are now looking to take this one step further, leveraging newly established engineering capabilities to help Elanco deliver on customer needs faster than ever before.

This role is part of our new enterprise platform engineering team with a specific focus on generative AI capability and their implementation in Elanco. This role will be working on the cutting edge of GenAI capability strategizing, building, and supporting our own implementations in Elanco. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to not only work on cutting edge technology but to contribute to the continued growth of a new highly skilled engineering organization.

To be successful in an engineering role in Elanco requires a highly motivated individual, with an innovative mindset and a willingness to drive tangible outcomes. The individual must be able to articulate complex technical topics, collaborate with external partners, and ensure quality delivery of the required solution.

Responsibilities:

Engineering

• Work with Principal Platform Engineer and Senior Product Owner to help drive direction of platform and automation capabilities including our internal technical products related to GenAI capabilities.
• Work with a diverse team on some of Elanco’s most exciting engineering initiatives helping drive secure, reliable, and efficient solutions using the latest technology.
• Stay abreast of the latest AI research, trends, and technologies, and apply this knowledge to drive continuous improvement and innovation within the team.
• Look for continuous improvement opportunities in our core ecosystem identifying new ways to enhance application team and developer experience.
• Bring your expertise into a team of talented engineers and continually help shape where the team can help to better enable our secure, reliable, efficient vision.
• Follow the value mentality with opportunity to work across the engineering team helping to ‘walk in the shoes’ of application teams as well as operational engineering teams.
• Communicate progress, results, and insights to management and other stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of MLops principles and practices.

Daily / Monthly Responsibilities

• Build and run responsibilities for GenAI ensuring robust support folding into standard incident processes as the products mature.
• Help work with distributed teams across the business on how to consume AI/ML capabilities.
• Hands-on code, build, govern, and maintain.
• Working as part of a scrum team, deliver high-quality technical deliverables.
• Designing and building solutions to support the automation of manual IT and business processes.
• Continually modernize software development processes using Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) techniques to ensure efficient and high-quality delivery.
• Establish strong partnerships with key service integrators (vendors), helping to support the adoption of automation capabilities.
• Establish a strong partnership with our application health program and Information Security, helping to identify opportunities and mitigate risks.
• Coach and mentor junior engineers, members of our student program to help build a strong connected organization.
• Supporting application teams, internal and external, helping to resolve barriers related to building, deployment, and utilization of engineering products.

Basic Qualifications:

Must have experience in the following areas:

• Minimum 2+ years of hands-on experience in Generative AI and LLMs. An overall 8+ years of experience as Software Engineer.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and other AI/ML frameworks.
• Strong understanding of MLops principles and practices.
• Ability to design and implement complex ML systems.
• Strong understanding of neural networks, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and other AI domains.
• Experience with cloud platforms and AI tools (e.g., Google Cloud, Azure).
• Familiarity with natural language processing or AI technologies (e.g., LLMs such as ChatGPT or BARD, Embeddings, Prompt Engineering).
• Experience with data pipelines and preferably processing of documents (e.g., using Google Cloud Fusion/Azure Data Factory).
• Demonstrated success in deploying AI solutions in real-world applications.
• Work closely with product managers, data scientists, software engineers, and other stakeholders to integrate AI solutions into existing and new products.
• Stay abreast of the latest AI research, trends, and technologies, and apply this knowledge to drive continuous improvement and innovation within the team.
• Strong background in either Python/Typescript.
• Operational experience taking internal products and ensuring they are well maintained, supported, and iterated upon.
• Experience working with technical and non-technical team members to encourage adoption of new versions of software or products.
• Working within a DevOps team including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), SDLC, etc.
• Familiarity working within an agile team.

Nice to Have:

Experience in some of the following areas:

• Experience working with Cloud Native design patterns, with a preference towards Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud.
• Hands-on Technical experience with at least some of our core technologies (Terraform, Ansible, Packer).
• Working with cloud cognitive services (e.g., Azure Cloud Vision or Google Vision AI).
• Working with AI/Embeddings technologies (e.g., Google Matching Engine, Azure AI Studio, Vertex AI).
• Experience working in/with an infrastructure team advantageous.
• Experience with modern application architecture methodologies (Service Oriented Architecture, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR, etc.).
• Experience supporting digital platforms, including Integrations, Release Management, Regression Testing, Data Obfuscation, etc.
• Knowledge of Azure Data Factory/ GCP Cloud Data Fusion, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning or GCP Cloud ML Engine, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks or GCP Cloud Dataproc.
• Experience scaling an “API-Ecosystem”, designing, and implementing “API-First” integration patterns.
• Experience working with authentication and authorization protocols/patterns.
• Experience with AI security, model evaluation, and safety.

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.

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