Solution Architect

Role Summary

Solution Architect within Elanco IT, providing technical thought leadership, shaping the business vision, and making key design decisions to influence technology investments and product roadmaps. Requires breadth and depth in application architecture, software engineering, and SaaS solutions with a track record of enterprise delivery. Collaborates with Product Managers, Product Designers, and Principal Engineers to ensure enterprise technology investments align with product direction.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the technical strategic vision and roadmap within a product group, ensuring the ecosystem supports product team needs.
• Own architecture assets (e.g., reference architectures) to influence investments and balance new features with technical debt reduction.
• Design implementation paths for custom and line-of-business SaaS and COTS applications, covering standard and specialized business processes.
• Work 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 to guide future strategies.
• Engage in pre-discovery activities with Product Management and Engineering to inform technical direction and hiring needs.
• Support integration of custom and SaaS applications, evaluating build vs. buy and promoting a composable landscape.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Assist Product Managers in articulating how technology visions and roadmaps support business outcomes.
• Build relationships with stakeholders to understand needs and influence necessary technological changes and investments.
• Establish partnerships with key service integrators and internal engineers to ensure competency and alignment.
• Externally connect to bring the outside-in perspective to leadership across the function.

Architecture Team

• Collaborate with business, Product Management, and enterprise/solution architects to rationalize technologies for efficiency and reuse.
• Support solution architecture review groups to ensure compliance with enterprise requirements.
• Contribute to architecture standards and patterns used by product teams.
• Identify and address technical debt to support portfolio health across functions and enterprise.
• Enable discovery capabilities to validate business and technology direction.

Qualifications

• Education: BS in Information Systems or Computer Science.
• Required Experience: 5+ years designing and delivering enterprise IT systems; experience leading technology selections.
• Strong technical background from hands-on IT engineering with diverse architecture experience.
• Appreciation of data architecture principles.
• Experience with modern application architecture methodologies (SOA, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR).
• Cloud-native design patterns, with preference for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
• Experience integrating SaaS providers using Integration-as-a-Service frameworks.
• Experience supporting digital platforms, including integrations, release management, regression testing, and data obfuscation.
• Experience scaling an API ecosystem and implementing API-first integration patterns.
• Strong communication and leadership skills with ability to convey complex topics and drive direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with infrastructure considerations (networking, hosting, security) for on-premise and cloud IT solutions.
• Experience in regulated industries such as life sciences or equivalent.
• Solution architecture certifications for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience operating in a product-driven architecture capability across products.

Education

• BS in Information Systems/Computer Science.

Additional Requirements

• Travel: 0-10%
• Location: Indianapolis, IN HQ