R&D Solution Architect in Hook

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. 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.

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.

Your role: Our Research & Development organization has an aggressive vision to implement a digital-first approach to discovering new pharmaceuticals. As a Solution Architect, you will champion the adoption of modern pharmaceutical development systems including High Performance Computation, AI & Machine Learning, Electronic Lab Notebooks, and Laboratory Execution systems to enable drug discovery and development in areas such as bioinformatics, computational chemistry, genomics, and systems biology. You will have the autonomy to make key design decisions and influence technology investments and product roadmaps.

This role requires technical breadth and depth in application architecture, software engineering, and pharma research SaaS solutions, as well as a proven track record of enterprise delivery. In this role, you will partner with Product Managers, Product Designers, and Principal Engineers to ensure the holistic direction of a product is enabled by enterprise technology investments. Additionally, solution architects are critical in ensuring that technology solutions align with enterprise architecture principles, standards, and reference architectures.

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 articulate and translate complex technical topics to stakeholders, help lift the technical competency of teams, collaborate with internal/external partners, ensure alignment with architectural principles and standards, and drive tangible business outcomes.

Your Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the technical strategic vision and roadmap within a product group or series of related products ensuring the technology ecosystem supports the needs of the product teams.
• Own key architecture assets including the city map and reference architecture to influence the right investments across a product group with a focus not only on new features but technical debt reduction.
• Design implementation paths for custom and Line of Business applications (Software-as-a-Service and Commercial-of-the-Shelf), covering commodity/highly industrialised business processes.
• Partner closely with Product Management and Principal Engineers to support taking an architectural design to a ‘ready to build’ state.
• Apply external technology trends (e.g. AI, cloud-native) to business problems applying where there is value influencing product teams to help drive future technology strategies.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Support Product Managers in business discussions helping to clearly articulate how technology visions and roadmaps support business outcomes.
• Build relationships with business stakeholders to better understand their needs and influence necessary changes and technology investments to meet business outcomes.
• Establish strong partnerships with key service integrators (vendors), and internal Elanco Engineers helping to ensure technical competency and architecture alignment.
• Externally connected bringing the outside in and art of the possible for leadership across the function.

Architecture Team

• Partner with business, Product Management, and enterprise/solution architects to recommend opportunities to rationalise or combine technologies that cut across functions looking for both efficiency and reuse opportunities.
• Partner across the architecture team to deliver on key central architecture initiatives that support continued growth and impact of Architecture across Elanco.
• Support solution architecture review groups to ensure solutions delivered meet enterprise requirements.
• Identify opportunities to directly contribute to architecture standards and patterns that product teams can use to implement solutions.
• Contribute to the identification and rationalisation of technical debt looking to recommend and support portfolio health initiatives across functions and enterprise.
• Enable the discovery capability to help validate business and technology direction.

What You Need to Succeed (minimum qualifications):

• B.S. in Information Systems/Computer Science.
• 5+ years of experience in architecting and delivering enterprise IT systems.
• Proven track-record working with pharmaceutical development IT systems and business processes (ELN, LIMS, CDS, LES, Informatics, Instruments, HPC, Regulatory).
• Example technologies include Benchling, Scilligence, Empower, Veeva Systems.
• Experience in large technology selection processes able to lead technical decision making.
• Strong technical background ideally from a hands-on IT engineering background, with array of different experiences in Architecture space.
• Appreciation of data architecture principles.
• Experience working with Cloud Native design patterns, with a preference towards Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud.
• Experience with interface implementation between SaaS providers (leveraging Integration-as-a-service frameworks).
• Experience supporting digital platforms, including Integrations, Release Management, Regression Testing, Data Obfuscation, etc.
• Experience scaling an “API-Ecosystem”, designing, and implementing “API-First” integration patterns.
• Strong organizational and communications skills with multiple examples of being able to convey complex technical topics, that resulted in a definitive direction.
• Strong leadership and proactive communication skills with a strong bias for action and ability to advise others.

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

• Experience working with Modern application architecture methodologies (Service Orientated Architecture, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR, etc.).
• “DevSecOps” culture, including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), etc.
• Deep understanding of the data lifecycle and computational workflows in a core R&D domain (e.g., target identification, lead optimization, bioinformatics, computational biology).
• Practical experience designing and implementing solutions that adhere to FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
• Experience architecting for High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments, including knowledge of workload schedulers (e.g., SLURM) and applying cloud-native patterns to scientific, batch-processing workloads.
• Familiarity with scientific workflow management tools (e.g., Nextflow, Snakemake) and the use of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) in research environments.
• Familiarity with infrastructure considerations (networking, hosting, security, etc.) in enabling on-premise and cloud IT solutions.
• Knowledge of data integrity and compliance standards within a GxP-regulated environment (e.g., 21 CFR Part 11).
• 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!