Solution Architect at Elanco in Hart, England, GB

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 Solution Architect, you will be the primary architectural authority for our Company Tower (Corporate G&A) and act as a critical bridge between our Enterprise ERP ecosystem (SAP) and Modern Engineering platforms. You will cover end-to-end value chains for HR, Legal, Finance, Procurement, and Gross-to-Net (G2N), while providing technical thought leadership to ensure a neutral fit approach across custom cloud-native builds, SAP BTP extensions, AI-driven automation, and best-of-breed SaaS.

Your Responsibilities:

Supporting product groups and associated products

• Lead the “build vs. buy vs. extend” analysis, objectively evaluating if a business need is best met within the ERPSAP ecosystem, through custom engineering (GCP/Azure), or via third-party SaaS.
• Support the holistic Company domain architectural blueprint owning key architecture assets including the city map and reference architecture to influence the right investments across a product group (HR, Finance, Legal, etc.) with a focus not only on new features but technical debt reduction.
• You will help advise on the design of scalable AI & Automation patterns for integrating Generative AI and LLMs into corporate workflows while maintaining strict data privacy, controls, SOX and compliance.
• Where integrating with ERP, partner with ERP domain architects and technical service owners to own the architecture assets that ensure the ERP remains standard, moving custom logic to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) or external microservices to reduce technical debt.
• Composable Architecture: Design implementation paths that treat the ERP as a set of services, driving a composable landscape where SAP and Non-SAP components communicate via standard APIs and events.
• Ready to Build: Partner with Principal Engineers to take high-level designs to a “ready to build” state, ensuring developers have clear “paved roads” for both SAP-centric and cloud-native projects.
• 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.
• Partner with Product Management and Engineering Product Teams in pre discovery activities helping to understand potential technical direction informing the hiring of key technical roles.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Partner with product leadership to engage senior business stakeholders helping map technical decisions to business value.
• Vendor Neutrality: Manage relationships with service integrators and vendors, ensuring their proposals align with Elanco’s architectural standards rather than vendor-specific lock-in.
• Help ensure privacy and security by design, ensuring solutions meet global compliance standards, particularly for sensitive HR, Finance and Legal data.

Architecture Team

• Cross-Platform Rationalization: Identify opportunities to consolidate technologies that span SAP and Non-SAP functions to drive efficiency and reuse.
• Incorporate cloud cost management into architectural designs to ensure long-term financial sustainability of digital products.
• Acts as a mentor to junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and architectural excellence.
• Integration Standards: Contribute to enterprise standards for Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and API Management, ensuring seamless data flow between the ERP and the wider digital estate.
• Partner with business, Product Management Teams, and enterprise/solution architects to recommend opportunities to rationalise or combine technologies that cut across functions looking for both efficiency and reuse opportunities.
• 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.
• Translation of enterprise architecture to how we engineer. This includes supporting the engineering experience direction including better standardisation including paved roads, metric driven engineering.

What You Need to Succeed (minimum qualifications):

• B.S. in Information Systems/Computer Science.

• 7+ years of experience in architecting and delivering enterprise IT 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.

• Experience with ERP solutions (SAP preferred) building upon and integrating with.

• Experience with SAP BTP platform preferred.

• Appreciation of data architecture principles.

• Experience working with:

  • Modern application architecture methodologies (Service Orientated Architecture, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR, etc.).
  • Cloud Native design patterns, with a preference towards Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud.
  • “DevSecOps” culture, including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), etc.
  • Experience with interface implementation between SaaS providers (leveraging Integration-as-a-service frameworks).
  • Experience supporting digital platforms, including Integrations, Release Management, Regression Testing, Integrations, 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):

• Familiarity with infrastructure considerations (networking, hosting, security, etc.) in enabling on-premise and cloud IT solutions.
• Experience working in a regulated industry such as life sciences or equivalent.
• Solution architecture certifications for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience working in a product operating model delivering architecture capability across product.
• Hands-on experience with SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).
• Experience architecture AI-integrated solutions or data science platforms.

Additional Information:

Location: Hook (Hybrid / 30 days per quarter in the office) 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 this 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.