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. We’re driven by our vision of ‘Food and Companionship Enriching Life’ and our approach to sustainability – the Elanco Healthy Purpose™ – to advance the health of animals, people, the planet and our enterprise.

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!

Location: Hook, UK (hybrid)

Position Description:

Driven by the quickening pace of innovation, Elanco IT must continue to evolve, proactively partnering to create new value through innovative digital products, services, and insights, supporting internal business partners and external customers.

As the Director of SaaS/Cloud Engineering at Elanco, you will be a key leader within our Engineering team, responsible for driving technical excellence and contributing to our product operating model. Your role will be pivotal in staffing, developing, and mentoring high-performing technical individuals, ensuring consistent practices, and upholding robust technical competency. You will guide empowered teams to deliver innovative, high-quality solutions across the value chain (from R& D to Commercial) that support Elanco's mission of advancing animal health.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership

• Lead and shape technical strategy in alignment with the Product Operating Model, focusing on agile, customer-driven development and operational excellence.

• Anticipate the need for new skillsets and competencies and create plans to address them.

• Collaborate with product, design, and business teams to define and execute engineering priorities.

• Partner with engineering demand management to ensure optimal resource alignment, third-party partnerships, and delivery capacity across product portfolios.

• Engage externally to understand market trends in engineering and SaaS platforms and prepare your team for these changes.

Team Development and Talent Management

• Lead the design and scaling of a modern engineering organization, cultivating a culture of craftsmanship, learning, and shared ownership.

• Develop and implement staffing plans to build and maintain a high-calibre engineering team.

• Carry out all elements of employee supervision, such as performance management, development coaching, learning plan oversight, task assignment and succession management.

• Recruit, mentor, coach, and develop engineering leaders and individual contributors, fostering growth and career development.

• Establish and promote consistent technical practices across teams to ensure high performance and productivity.

• Champion diversity of thought, psychological safety, and servant leadership.

• Serve as a cultural stabilizer and change agent, helping teams navigate transformation through psychological safety, trust-building, and clarity—especially during restructuring, M& A, or shifting priorities.

Technical Excellence

• Drive the adoption of modern engineering and development methodologies, best practices, and innovative technologies.

• Champion SaaS-first, Cloud-first, AI-innovation, automation, and end-to-end design thinking to reduce manual effort and increase the quality, velocity, and trust in data-driven decision making.

• Foster continuous improvement in technical competency, configuration & code quality, and system architecture.

• Partnering with technology leaders, oversee technical roadmaps and project delivery, ensuring solutions meet quality, reliability, and scalability standards.

Empowered Team Culture

• Foster an environment that empowers teams to make data-driven decisions and innovate through experimentation.

• Ensure clear communication channels, encouraging collaboration and transparency within and across teams.

• Support a culture that values cross-functional collaboration, shared ownership, and a strong focus on customer outcomes.

Operational Oversight and Governance

• Partner with Engineering demand management supporting incoming demand with Engineering resource.

• Support Engineering Demand Management with product governance discussions ensuring the right engineering talent is deployed to support product needs.

• Implement Engineering governance frameworks that ensure consistency, risk management, and adherence to compliance standards.

• Monitor and optimize engineering processes to drive efficiency, reduce technical debt, and support sustainable growth.

• Balance the ‘Fusion Team’ concept, taking agency approaches to run engineering and ensuring we have strong talent management, deployment practices and ability to respond to demand at speed.

Qualifications and Experience:

• A proven track record of 7+ years in a leadership role, with strong technical understanding and hands-on experience of SaaS Platforms such as Salesforce.com, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Veeva Vault, Veeva Network.

• Demonstrated success in staffing, developing, and leading high-performing technical teams, in particular through transformations and large-scale organizational change.

• Strong experience with agile methodologies, DevSecOps practices, and modern engineering frameworks.

• Strong grasp of data privacy, security and compliance in a global context (GDPR, GxP, SOX).

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence across cross-functional teams.

• A deep commitment to technical excellence and an ability to empower teams through continuous learning and improvement.

• Familiarity with AI/ML platform integration and intelligent automation is highly preferred.

• Experience embedding and scaling the product-first principles as defined by the Product Operating Model would be highly advantageous.

Education Requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology (IT) or equivalent experience.

Other Information: Occasional travel may be required.

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