Lead Engineer

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 are driven by our vision of Food and Companionship Enriching Life and our purpose – all to Go Beyond for Animals, Customers, Society and Our People.

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!

As a Lead Engineer, you will be part of our Enterprise AI engineering team to deliver secure, reliable, and innovative AI solutions across our business. In this role, you’ll be responsible for advancing our modern technology stack by building, deploying, and supporting cutting-edge GenAI capabilities that drive real value for Elanco.

Your Responsibilities:

• Lead and inspire a team of talented engineers, fostering a culture of psychological safety, curiosity, and creative problem-solving to drive continuous innovation.

• Partner with Principal Engineers to define and execute the strategic technical roadmap for our AI capabilities.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards, ensuring the platform remains stable, secure, and reliable while allowing for rapid experimentation.

• Drive technical excellence across the team by championing best practices in coding, architecture, and automated testing.

• Act as a technical consultant for product teams, helping them navigate complex integrations and architectural decisions.

• Champion the "value-first" mentality, ensuring the team’s efforts are always aligned with delivering tangible outcomes for Elanco’s customers.

• Oversee "build and run" responsibilities for Enterprise AI products, ensuring high availability and robust support through mature incident processes.

• Provide architectural oversight and hands-on technical guidance for the development of AI-driven applications.

• Lead Scrum ceremonies from a technical perspective, ensuring the team delivers high-quality increments and meets sprint goals.

• Mentor and coach Senior and Software Engineers, as well as members of our student program, to cultivate a high-performing and connected engineering organisation.

• Drive CI/CD maturity, continually modernising software development processes to ensure efficient and high-quality delivery.

• Resolve complex technical barriers, providing sound and scalable solutions for the most challenging issues facing the team.

What You Need to Succeed (minimum qualifications):

• Extensive Experience: Proven track record of leading the delivery and maintenance of complex software products in a DevOps and Agile environment.

• Deep practical experience with RAG, LLMs, and MLOps.

• Expert-level understanding of NLP, Embeddings, and Prompt Engineering.

• Expert proficiency in Python, React, and TypeScript.

• Significant experience with Cloud platforms (GCP or Azure) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).

• Experience designing and implementing data processing and document ingestion pipelines (e.g., Vertex AI, Google Cloud Fusion, or Azure Data Factory).

• Deep understanding of the SDLC, API-Centric Design, and Twelve-Factor App principles.

• Proven experience mentoring engineers and leading technical teams to success.

• Deep familiarity with authentication and authorisation protocols/patterns and secure-by-design principles.

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

• A passion for AI with the ability to translate emerging research and trends into practical business solutions.

• Exceptional ability to articulate complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive adoption and alignment.

Additional Information:

Travel: 0% - Not specified

Location: UK - Hook (Hybrid - Three days per week in the office) Experience working across different time zones is required.

Don’t meet every single requirement ? Studies have shown underrecognized 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 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

Elanco may use automated tools, including AI, to support parts of our recruitment process, such as reviewing applications against job‑related criteria and/or transferrable skills. These tools help ensure a consistent, structured evaluation, but they do not make hiring decisions. All decisions involve a human reviewer. For more information on how we handle personal data, please see our Elanco Workforce Privacy Notice.