Solution Architect

Role Summary

Solution Architect at Elanco IT, responsible for providing technical thought leadership, influencing technology investments and product roadmaps, and ensuring enterprise architecture alignment. You will collaborate with Product Managers, Product Designers, and Principal Engineers to enable holistic product direction through enterprise technology. This role requires breadth and depth in application architecture, software engineering, and SaaS solutions with a track record of delivering at scale.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the technical strategic vision and roadmap within a product group or series of related products, ensuring the technology ecosystem supports product needs.
• Own architecture assets including reference architectures to influence investments across a product group, balancing new features with technical debt reduction.
• Design implementation paths for custom and Line of Business applications (SaaS and COTS), covering commodity and highly industrialised processes.
• Partner with Product Management and Principal Engineers to move architectural designs to a ready-to-build state.
• Apply external technology trends (e.g., AI, cloud-native) to business problems where value is found, guiding future technology strategies.
• Engage in pre-discovery activities to understand technical direction and inform hiring of key technical roles.
• Support integration of custom and SaaS-based applications, balancing build vs buy and enabling a composable landscape.

Qualifications

• Required: B.S. in Information Systems/Computer Science.
• Required: 5+ years of experience in architecting and delivering enterprise IT systems.
• Required: Experience leading large technology selection processes and technical decision making.
• Required: Strong technical background with hands-on IT engineering experience across architecture spaces; appreciation of data architecture principles.
• Required: Experience with modern application architecture methodologies (SOA, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR, etc.) and Cloud Native design patterns (Azure/Google Cloud preferred).
• Required: Experience with interface implementations between SaaS providers (Integration-as-a-Service frameworks) and supporting digital platforms (Integrations, Release Management, Regression Testing, Data Obfuscation, etc.).
• Required: Experience scaling an API ecosystem and designing API-First integration patterns.
• Required: Strong organizational and communications skills; ability to convey complex topics and lead direction.
• Required: Strong leadership, proactive communication, and bias for action.
• Preferred: Familiarity with infrastructure considerations (networking, hosting, security) for on-premise and cloud IT solutions.
• Preferred: Experience working in regulated industries such as life sciences.
• Preferred: Solution architecture certifications for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform; experience delivering architecture capability across product operating models.

Skills

• Technical thought leadership
• Enterprise architecture alignment
• Stakeholder management
• Pre-discovery and discovery activities
• Product and engineering collaboration
• API-first design and integration patterns

Education

• B.S. in Information Systems/Computer Science

Additional Requirements

• Travel: 0-10%
• Location: Indianapolis, IN - Hybrid Work Environment