Senior Principal - Principal RE, Cloud & Hosting @ GlaxoSmithKline

Business Introduction

GSK remains committed to achieving bold commercial ambitions for the future. By 2031, we aim to deliver £40 billion in annual sales, leveraging our existing strong performance momentum to significantly increase our positive impact on the health of billions of patients globally. Our Ahead Together strategy is centred on early intervention to prevent and alter the course of disease, thereby protecting people and supporting healthcare systems.

Our diverse portfolio consists of vaccines, specialty medicines, and general medicines.

Through continuous innovation and a dedicated focus on scientific and technical excellence, we strive to develop and launch new, groundbreaking treatments that address critical health challenges.

Job Purpose

The Site Reliability Engineer improves the reliability, resilience and observability of GSK's platforms as a hands-on engineer, reducing toil, preventing incidents and meeting agreed reliability targets. The role defines and monitors SLOs, instruments platforms for observability, leads incident response through to permanent prevention, and applies AI and automation for anomaly detection, predictive alerting and self-healing. It also coaches platform engineering teams in reliability practice and error-budget discipline.

The role sits in Reliability Engineering & Operations and is deployed into a platform domain while drawing on the central capability, so it holds the central reliability standard inside a team it does not report to. Platform build and engineering direction sit with the Principal Engineers and the Engineering Director, the major incident process sits with the Major Incident Manager, and the reliability standard itself is set by the Reliability Engineering Senior Director. Reliability targets are held jointly with the Platform Manager rather than imposed on them.

ROLE SCALE AND COMPLEXITY

This is a senior enterprise reliability leadership role operating across globally distributed, business-critical cloud and hosting services. The post holder is accountable for setting technical direction, resolving systemic and ambiguous reliability risks, and influencing prioritisation across multiple platform teams, suppliers and geographies without relying on direct line authority.

The role manages a portfolio of interdependent services with material operational, regulatory, cyber, resilience and financial consequences. It shapes investment and supplier decisions and may influence or govern an annual technology and service portfolio of up to approximately GBP 23 million, where applicable to the assigned scope.

MARKET SCOPE

Global scope, supporting business operations across regions, countries and markets in which GSK operates. The role establishes consistent reliability outcomes across regional delivery teams while accommodating local regulatory, data-residency, business-continuity and market-criticality requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and monitor SLOs for the platforms served, and instrument those platforms for observability so reliability is measured rather than assumed.
• Apply AI and automation for anomaly detection, predictive alerting and self-healing, so that recurring conditions are handled without human intervention.
• Lead incident response for the platforms served, and drive root-cause resolution through to permanent prevention rather than closing on restoration.
• Improve resilience through capacity, failover and recovery engineering, and test recovery rather than documenting it.
• Reduce operational toil through automation and reusable tooling, working the identified manual task and toil candidates and evidencing the effort removed.
• Close observability coverage gaps for the platforms served, prioritising by the reliability risk each gap leaves unmeasured.
• Coach platform engineering teams in reliability practice and error-budget discipline, so reliability is built in rather than inspected in.
• Track reliability metrics against SLOs and team OKRs, and act on the trend rather than only reporting it.
• Support reliability oversight of supplier-run services, holding partner-operated components to the same SLOs as internal ones.
• Hold the central reliability standard while deployed in a platform domain, escalating to the Reliability Engineering Senior Director where local pressure would erode it.
• Feed reliability evidence into the platform backlog held by the Product Owner, so that resilience work competes on stated risk rather than on goodwill.
• Hold the boundaries with the Principal Engineers on platform build, the Major Incident Manager on the major incident process, and the Platform Manager on the reliability targets the platform commits to.
• Set the multi-year reliability strategy and engineering roadmap for the assigned cloud and hosting portfolio, translating enterprise risk and business priorities into funded reliability outcomes.
• Own cross-platform reliability governance, including service tiering, SLO policy, error-budget decisions, resilience exceptions and common engineering standards across internal and supplier-operated services.
• Lead resolution of complex, high-impact and systemic failure modes spanning cloud, hosting, network, security, applications and third-party dependencies, with authority to convene senior technical and service leaders.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations for investment, risk acceptance and supplier performance decisions, including prioritisation across a material service portfolio and, where delegated, spend of up to approximately GBP 25 million.
• Represent Reliability Engineering in Director, Senior Director and VP-level governance, communicating service risk, business impact, trade-offs and required decisions in clear executive terms.
• Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers, build communities of practice and raise engineering capability across regions rather than delivering only through individual contribution.

Education & Professional Qualifications

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering).
• Reliability or platform certifications desirable (e.g., a recognised cloud certification, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or ITIL 4 for incident and problem practice).

Area of Specialisation

• Site reliability engineering, covering SLOs, observability instrumentation, error budgets and toil reduction.
• AIOps and operations automation, covering anomaly detection, predictive alerting and self-healing.

Why is this level of Education Required?

• An engineering grounding is needed because the role writes the automation and instrumentation itself and must be credible to platform engineers whose systems it is changing.

Job-Related Experience

• Overall 15 Years and typically 10-12+ years in infrastructure, cloud, platform or reliability engineering, including significant experience leading enterprise-scale reliability outcomes across multiple teams or service domains.
• 5+ years of hands-on SRE, Reliability Engineering, or Cloud Operations experience.
• Experience supporting large-scale production cloud and hosting environments.
• Experience owning operational reliability for critical business services.
• Proven record of improving service availability, resiliency, and operational efficiency.
• Demonstrated accountability for globally distributed, 24x7, business-critical services and for decisions with material operational, regulatory, customer or financial impact.
• Proven ability to influence Directors, Senior Directors and VP-level stakeholders, including presenting options, quantified risk, trade-offs and investment recommendations.
• Experience governing strategic suppliers and complex service ecosystems, with exposure to substantial technology budgets or portfolios; direct budget ownership is desirable but not mandatory where strong investment influence is evidenced.
• Track record of setting technical direction, leading through ambiguity and developing senior engineering capability across organisational and geographic boundaries.

Technical Requirements

• Strong experience with: Azure and/or GCP, Linux and Windows Server platforms, Containers and Kubernetes, Cloud networking fundamentals, Infrastructure as Code , Cloud observability platforms
• Hands-on proficiency in: Terraform, Ansible, Python , CI/CD pipelines, Monitoring and telemetry solutions.

Reliability & Operations

• Experience defining and operating: SLIs , SLOs, Error Budgets, Operational KPIs
• Experience leading: Major incident response, post-incident reviews, Root-cause analysis , Capacity management, Resiliency and recovery testing.

Operational Excellence

• Demonstrated experience in: Runbook development, Operational readiness reviews, Service transitions, Continuous service improvement, Automation-led toil reduction

Skills/Background

• Comfort operating inside a team that is not the reporting line, holding a central standard without formal authority.
• Composure in live incidents, including deciding when to stop investigating and restore.
• Discipline to pursue root cause after service is restored and attention has moved on.
• Ability to coach engineers into reliability practice rather than policing them into it.
• Judgement about which observability gaps matter and which are noise.
• Willingness to automate away the work rather than becoming indispensable to it.

#AGTech

Skills

CI/CD, Cloud Based Services, Configuration Management (CM), Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), Disaster Recovery (DR), Financial Operations, Identity Access Management (IAM), Incident Management, Infrastructure As Code (IaC), Kubernetes, Major Incident Management, Operating Systems (OS), Performance Tuning, Resilience Engineering, Scripting, SRE Observability, System Monitors, Terraform (Software), Vulnerability Management

Why GSK?

Uniting science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together.

GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of the decade, as a successful, growing company where people can thrive. We get ahead of disease by preventing and treating it with innovation in specialty medicines and vaccines. We focus on four therapeutic areas: respiratory, immunology and inflammation; oncology; HIV; and infectious diseases – to impact health at scale.

People and patients around the world count on the medicines and vaccines we make, so we’re committed to creating an environment where our people can thrive and focus on what matters most. Our culture of being ambitious for patients, accountable for impact and doing the right thing is the foundation for how, together, we deliver for patients, shareholders and our people.

Inclusion at GSK

As an employer committed to Inclusion, we encourage you to reach out if you need any adjustments during the recruitment process.

Please contact our Recruitment Team at [email protected] to discuss your needs.

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