Lead Engineer - Platform Engineering

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!

Your Role: Lead Engineer - Platform Engineering

As a Platform Engineer, your core mission is to improve Elanco’s developer experience by designing, building, and operating reusable platform capabilities and Golden Paths - curated, self-service workflows that reduce cognitive load and help teams apply established engineering practices consistently.

By focusing on reuse, automation, and standardized tooling, you help product teams spend less time managing infrastructure and more time delivering business value.

This role makes AI-assisted engineering a safe, repeatable, and valuable part of how Elanco builds software and data products.

You will independently own complex capabilities that embed AI and automation across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), reducing toil while ensuring engineers remain accountable for architecture, quality, security, and production outcomes.

Position Scope:


* Hands-on Individual Contributor: Personally design and implement important platform parts, resolve difficult engineering problems, review code/designs, and coach others through pairing and feedback.


* Situational Leadership: Technical leadership is shared and situational.

You may lead the technical approach for a bounded initiative or contribute as a team member while another leads.

This role carries no permanent line-management, team-lead, or delivery-management accountability.

Your Responsibilities:


* Building the AI Ecosystem & Components: Partner with the Principal Platform Engineer and peers to turn agreed priorities into reliable capabilities.

Build reusable components - such as secure model/tool integrations, context-retrieval tools, controlled agent workflows, evaluation harnesses, and human-approval controls - embedding AI directly into developers' existing tools (IDEs, CI/CD, source control, engineering portals).


* Technical Ownership & Delivery: Independently own complex platform capabilities through design, prototyping, coding, integration, testing, deployment, and ongoing improvement.

Make reasoned design trade-offs, resolve multi-component problems across team boundaries, and partn...