Databricks Platform 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. We pride ourselves on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment. Here, you’ll be part of a company that values and champions new ways of thinking, works with dynamic individuals, and acquires new skills and experiences that will propel your career to new heights.

Your role: As the Databricks Platform Architect, you will provide thought leadership and contribute to the business vision as Elanco becomes a more data‑driven organization using Databricks. You will have the autonomy to make key design decisions and influence investments and product roadmaps. In addition to strong technical skills and experience of the Databricks platform, this role requires technical breadth and depth in data architecture, engineering, AI, and integrating solutions, as well as a proven track record of enterprise delivery.

In this role, you will support key product groups and product teams across our enterprise, partnering with Product Managers, Product Designers, Solution Architects and Principal Engineers to ensure the holistic direction of a product team is enabled by appropriate Databricks capabilities and investments. The role will be a part of the Data Engineering organization which is responsible for transforming Elanco into a data‑driven company through a dedicated focus on data architecture, engineering, analytics, and AI.

You will also partner closely with enterprise data and AI architects and peers to identify and implement global capabilities and deliver data solutions in alignment with Elanco’s enterprise reference architecture and engineering framework. This position reports to the Senior Director IT – IT Engineering – Data & SaaS/Cloud.

To be successful, you should be a highly motivated individual with an innovative and strategic mindset, a bias for action, proactive communication skills, the ability to form and communicate a strong perspective and translate ambitious ideas into scalable platform capabilities. You must be able to communicate and explain complex technical topics to a wide range of stakeholders, help lift the data literacy of teams, collaborate with internal/external partners, ensure alignment with architectural principles and standards, and drive tangible business outcomes.

Your Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain a holistic view of Elanco’s Databricks footprint and drive the adoption of key features and capabilities by identifying use cases across Elanco product teams and creating target reference architectures.
• Contribute to the technical strategic vision, integrated data strategy, and roadmap within a product group or series of related products ensuring the Databricks platform supports the needs of the product teams appropriately.
• Design scalable capabilities that will ingest, transform, and distribute numerous data streams and batches in support of key initiatives.
• Influence cross product and product groups partnering with architects across the enterprise to ensure alignment with our holistic vision of the Databricks platform.
• Prototype, test and learn, and plan the design and integration of capabilities to enable various business processes and data assets, delivering high value outcomes.
• Identify, design, and implement process improvements opportunities by automating manual processes and optimizing data delivery.
• Translate emerging and experimental concepts into production-ready architectural patterns.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• Support Product Managers in business discussions helping to clearly articulate how Databricks can support business outcomes.
• Build relationships with business stakeholders to better understand their needs and influence necessary changes and data investments to meet business outcomes.
• Create strong partnerships with key service integrators (vendors), and internal Elanco Data Engineers helping to ensure technical competency and architecture alignment.
• Establish a strong alliance with Databricks through our account team and beyond, influencing their product roadmap to meet our needs, participating visibly at their events and evaluating emerging features.
• Be externally connected to bring the outside in and demonstrate the art of the possible for leadership across the function.

Architecture Team:

• Partner with business, Product Management, and enterprise/solution architects to recommend opportunities to capitalize on our Databricks investments across the enterprise 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 data solutions delivered meet enterprise requirements.
• Identify opportunities to directly contribute to architecture standards and patterns that product teams can use to implement appropriate data and analytic patterns.
• 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 data direction.

What You Need to Succeed (minimum qualifications):

• B.S. in Information Systems/Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of experience in architecting and delivering integrated data solutions.
• 5+ years of experience building and optimizing data pipelines in cloud/hybrid cloud computing environments (Azure, Google Cloud).
• 3+ years of experience working with the Databricks platform to meet challenging business needs and deliver outcomes.
• Expertise in data management, information integration and analytics practices and capabilities.
• Experience working with modern data architectures and engineering methodologies (Domain driven data architecture, Scalable data pipelines, DataOps(CI/CD), API-Centric Design, SQL/NoSQL, FAIR data principles, etc.).
• Familiarity with Machine Learning workflows and Data Science concepts.
• Demonstrated ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, influencing strategic decisions and driving clear direction.
• Strong leadership and proactive communication skills with a strong bias for action and ability to advise others.
• Several examples of powerful storytelling, to gain platform investment and/or articulate the business value.

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

• Proven track record in leading and delivering on complex data projects.
• Appreciation of application architecture principles and integration patterns.
• Experience working in a regulated industry such as life sciences or equivalent.
• Experience working in a multi-cloud environment and positioning Databricks’ capabilities alongside and against other offerings, e.g. Google Vertex.
• Proven track record as a coach and/or mentor in developing technical skills.

Additional Information:

• Travel: 0-10%
• Location: Hook, UK – Hybrid Work Environment