Principal Engineer - Gen AI

About Elanco

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!

Over the past 4 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 with a specific focus on generative AI capability and their implementation in Elanco. This role will be working on the cutting edge of GenAI capability strategizing, build and supporting our own implementations in Elanco. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to not only work on cutting edge technology 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.

Your Responsibilities

• Work with Principal Platform Engineer and Senior Product Owner to help drive direction of platform and automation capabilities including our internal technical products related to GenAI capabilities.
• Work with a diverse team on some of Elanco’s most exciting engineering initiatives helping drive secure, reliable, and efficient using the latest technology.
• Stay abreast of the latest AI research, trends, and technologies, and apply this knowledge to drive continuous improvement and innovation within the team.
• 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.
• Communicate progress, results, and insights to management and other stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of MLops principles and practices

Daily / Monthly Responsibilities

• Build and run responsibilities for GenAI ensuring robust support folding into standard incident processes as the products mature.
• Help work with distributed teams across the business on how to consume AI/ML capabilities.
• Hands on code, build, govern and maintain.
• Working as part of a scrum team, deliver high quality technical deliverables.
• Designing and building solutions to support the automation of manual IT and business processes.
• 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 junior engineers, members of our student program to help build a strong connected organisation.
• Supporting application teams, internal and external, helping to resolve barriers related to building, deployment, and utilisation of engineering products.

What You Need to Succeed (minimum qualifications)

• Minimum 2+ years of hands‑on experience in Generative AI and LLMs. An overall 8+ years of experience as Software Engineer.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and other AI/ML frameworks.
• Strong understanding of MLops principles and practices
• Ability to design and implement complex ML systems
• Strong understanding of neural networks, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and other AI domains.
• Experience with cloud platforms and AI tools (e.g., Google Cloud, Azure).
• Familiarity with natural language processing or AI technologies (e.g LLMs such as ChatGPT or BARD, Embeddings, Prompt Engineering)
• Experience with data pipelines and preferably processing of documents (e.g using Google Cloud Fusion/Azure Data Factory)
• Demonstrated success in deploying AI solutions in real‑world applications.
• Work closely with product managers, data scientists, software engineers, and other stakeholders to integrate AI solutions into existing and new products.
• Strong background in either Python/Typescript
• Operational experience taking internal products and ensuring they are well maintained, supported, and iterated upon.
• Experience working with technical and non‑technical team members to encourage adoption of new versions of software or products.
• Working within a DevOps team including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test‑Driven Development (TDD), SDLC, etc.
• Familiarity working within an agile team.

What will give you a competitive edge (preferred qualifications)

• Experience working with Cloud Native design patterns, with a preference towards Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud.
• Hands‑on Technical experience with at least some of our core technologies (Terraform, Ansible, Packer).
• Working with cloud cognitive services (e.g Azure Cloud Vision or Google Vision AI)
• Working with AI/Embeddings technologies (e.g Google Matching Engine, Azure AI Studio, Vertex AI)
• 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 supporting digital platforms, including Integrations, Release Management, Regression Testing, Integrations, Data Obfuscation, etc.
• Knowledge of Azure Data Factory/ GCP Cloud Data Fusion, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning or GCP Cloud ML Engine, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks or GCP Cloud Dataproc.
• Experience scaling an “API‑Ecosystem”, designing, and implementing “API‑First” integration patterns.
• Experience working with authentication and authorisation protocols/patterns.
• Experience with AI security, model evaluation, and safety.

Additional Information

Location: Hook, UK - Hybrid Work Environment

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Elanco we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive work environment. If you think you might be a good fit for a role but don't necessarily meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply. You may be the right candidate for this role or other roles!

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

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