Lead Automation

Solution Ops Engineer Job Description

Role Title: Lead Engineer – Platform & Automation

Location: UK

Team: Platform Engineering

Supervisor: IT Engineering Director

Career Progression: Engineering, Architecture, Analyst

Position Description:

Over the past four 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 focused on driving secure, reliable, efficient practice across our business and IT teams. This role will engage in the build, and iteration of our advanced cloud automation patterns, as well as developing solutions to automate manual process across business and IT. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to not only work with the latest toolsets but to contribute to the continued growth of a new highly skilled engineering organisation.

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 to help drive direction of platform and automation capabilities including our internal technical products.

• Focusing on effective communication within the team, ensuring tasks are assigned, priorities are clear, and team members are well-supported.

• Work with a diverse team on some of Elanco’s most exciting engineering initiatives helping drive secure, reliable, and efficient using the latest technology.

• Team coordination, overseeing the progress of tasks, and ensuring the team meets work package deadlines.

• Ensuring that the team is working effectively towards project goals and objectives.

• 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.

Daily / Monthly Responsibilities

• Team coordination, overseeing the progress of tasks, and ensuring the team meets project deadlines.

• Ensuring effective collaboration and communication towards the project goals.

• Operations responsibility for our technical product set and related cloud automation products including technical expertise, customer engagement and strong operational process governance.

• Help land changes and upgrades of deployment patterns into application teams helping teams to manage impact downstream to their applications.

• Clear communications to app teams and leadership as new versions of Horizon are shipped being clear on mandatory and non-mandatory changes to ensure a health portfolio.

• Hands on code, build, govern and maintain.

• Working as part of a scrum team, deliver high quality technical deliverables.

• Building new and enhancing existing automation patterns across our multi-cloud estate.

• Designing and building solutions to support the automation of manual IT and business process.

• Continually modernise 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 senior and junior engineers, as well as members of our student program to help build a strong connected organisation.

• Supporting application teams, internal, and external engineering teams with barriers related to application build, deployment, or utilisation of engineering products.

Basic Qualifications:

• 
  Must have experience in the following areas.

• Proficiency in using Ansible Automation Platform for configuration management, ensuring efficient and reproducible infrastructure environments.

• Proficient in using Packer for creating cross-platform machine images

• Experience working with Cloud Native design patterns, with a preference towards Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud.
  Demonstrated experience working with GCP, including but not limited to provisioning resources, managing configurations, and optimizing performance within the GCP environment. Knowledge of GCP services and a proven ability to deploy and manage infrastructure on the GCP platform is essential.

• Working within a DevOps team including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), SDLC, etc.

• Operational experience taking internal products and ensuring they are well maintained, supported and iterated upon.

• Good skills in Application Development in JavaScript (TypeScript, ReactJS and other NodeJS)

• Experience working with technical and non-technical team members to encourage adoption of new versions of software or products.

• Good Coding skills in any of the Programming Language. Like Python, JavaScript, TypeScript.

• Hands-on Technical experience with at least some of our core technologies (Terraform, Ansible, Packer, TypeScript).

• Experience working in/with an infrastructure team advantageous.

• Experience with modern application architecture methodologies (Service Orientated Architecture, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR, etc.).

• Experience of automation tooling and technologies advantageous including modern API driven automation and awareness of RPA based technologies.

• 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.

• Experience working with authentication and authorisation protocols/patterns.

• Solid understanding of networking, security, and system administration.

• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.

• Familiarity working within an agile team.

• Proficiency in containerization and orchestration tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

• Experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) and configuration management tools.

• Experience with microservices architecture and containerization patterns.

• Knowledge of serverless computing and functions as a service (FaaS).

• Proficiency in scripting languages like Python, Ruby, or Go.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.

• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a team.

• Strong time management and prioritization skills.

Personal Traits:

• Explain complex technical concept in the simple words.

• Strong attention to detail.

• Ability to adapt to changing technologies and environments.

• Willingness to learn and explore new tools and technologies.

• Strong work ethic and commitment to meeting deadlines.

• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.

• Ability to work well under pressure and handle critical incidents effectively.

Other Information: Occasional travel may be required.