{"id":3047834,"url":"https://alion.io/job/gsk-principal-pc-platform-architect-m365-2","title":"Principal P&C Platform Architect - M365","company":{"id":6649,"name":"GSK","domain":"gsk.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/gsk","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":86,"open_postings":54,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.759,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":17,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Enterprise Apps","role_family":"Enterprise Apps","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":96000,"max_usd":194000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_cell","sample_n":11},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot Studio","optional":false},{"name":"DLP","optional":false},{"name":"GDPR","optional":false},{"name":"Microsoft Defender for Cloud","optional":false},{"name":"Microsoft Entra ID","optional":false},{"name":"OneDrive","optional":false},{"name":"PowerShell","optional":false},{"name":"SharePoint","optional":false},{"name":"Zero Trust","optional":false},{"name":"21 CFR Part 11","optional":true},{"name":"C#","optional":true},{"name":"Dropbox","optional":true},{"name":"FinOps","optional":true},{"name":"Google Workspace","optional":true},{"name":"IAM","optional":true},{"name":"Power BI","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"Slack","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T10:38:41Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":9,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":9},"description":"At GSK, we unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We are a global biopharma company with a special purpose - to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We’re proud to be leading a healthcare revolution, and we’re looking for people who can help us deliver on our ambition.\nRole Overview\nOwn the architecture of the platform where 50,000+ employees across multiple countries actually do their work - email, files, meetings, chat, intranet, workflow and, increasingly, AI assistance. This role is the definitive technical authority for the Microsoft 365 estate: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the Entra ID and Purview controls that govern them.\nMicrosoft 365 is no longer a set of applications; it is a tenant-wide platform where an identity decision, a sharing default or a licensing choice propagates instantly to every user and every document. The Principal Platform Architect is accountable for making those decisions deliberately and coherently - balancing collaboration velocity against information protection, and platform capability against cost.\nThis is a hands-on-capable role. The expectation is to build, prove and pressure-test designs in a lab tenant personally, and to be the person who understands what a setting actually does rather than what the documentation claims.\nIn this role you will\nOwn the target-state architecture for the M365 tenant: workload topology, tenant and domain strategy, identity and licensing model, data residency, and the integration surface with the wider application estate. \nDefine the multi-year productivity and collaboration roadmap - workload adoption and retirement, migration off legacy platforms (on-premises Exchange/SharePoint, file shares, third-party collaboration tools), and consolidation of overlapping tooling. \nTrack the Microsoft 365 roadmap and message centre continuously; assess incoming change for risk and opportunity, and decide what the organisation adopts, defers, or disables - before Microsoft decides for you. \nProduce and maintain reference architectures, design patterns and architecture decision records (ADRs) with trade-offs made explicit. \nArchitect information protection across the tenant: Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, retention and records management, DLP, eDiscovery, insider risk, and Communication Compliance. \nDesign the external sharing, guest access and B2B collaboration model - the single most consequential and most frequently mis-set area of the platform. \nEnsure the tenant meets regulatory obligations: data privacy (GDPR and equivalents), data residency and Multi-Geo, GxP and validated-system requirements, records retention, legal hold, and audit/SOX ITGC evidence generation designed in rather than bolted on. \nPartner with Cyber Security on tenant security posture - Conditional Access, Defender for Office 365, Defender for Cloud Apps, Secure Score, token and session controls, and the endpoint's role in tenant trust. \nOwn the architecture for Microsoft 365 Copilot and agent platforms: readiness assessment, permission and oversharing remediation, semantic index behaviour, grounding and data boundaries, licensing strategy and measurable value realisation. \nEstablish governance for Copilot Studio and agent creation - who may build, on what data, with what review and lifecycle. \nSet the position on AI data handling and prompt/response retention that Legal, Privacy and the Works Council will accept. \nArchitect the Power Platform environment strategy: environment topology, data loss prevention policies, connector governance, ALM pipelines, and the boundary between citizen and professional development. \nDesign the guardrails that let the business build safely without generating an unmanaged shadow estate. \nAct as design authority for all M365 tenant change; chair or sit on the architecture review board and hold veto on standards deviation. \nSet engineering standards for tenant configuration-as-code, change testing, staged rollout and rollback. \nReview supplier and MSP technical designs; ensure partners build to the organisation's architecture, not their own delivery convenience. \nDesign for adoption: architect the telemetry that shows what is actually used, and treat low adoption of a funded capability as an architectural or experience defect. \nOwn licence architecture and optimisation - SKU mix, add-on strategy, and defensible cost-per-user modelling at 50,000-user scale, where a single per-user add-on is a seven-figure decision. \nMentor and technically develop senior engineers and platform leads across the collaboration domain. \nWhy you?\nBasic Qualifications:\nWe are looking for professionals with these required skills to achieve our goals:\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical discipline, or equivalent demonstrable professional expertise. \nSignificant experience in IT infrastructure, collaboration or digital workplace technology, including a number of years in a principal, lead or enterprise architect capacity with recognised design authority. \nArchitecture ownership for a Microsoft 365 tenant of 20,000+ users across multiple countries and regulatory jurisdictions. \nExpert-level, hands-on-derived command of the core M365 workloads - Exchange Online, SharePoint Online/OneDrive, Teams - and the Entra ID and Purview controls that govern them. Sufficient to build the reference configuration personally, not only to specify it. \nDemonstrable ownership of an enterprise information governance and external sharing model, including the compliance rationale behind it. \nAdvanced PowerShell and Microsoft Graph portfolio; evidence of configuration-as-code applied to a production tenant. \nWorking fluency in M365 security architecture and zero-trust principles, with a track record of co-designing controls alongside a Cyber Security function. \nLed the architecture of at least one large-scale collaboration platform migration or transformation through to production - including what went wrong and what was learned. \nExperience owning or materially influencing a Microsoft licensing position at enterprise scale (EA/MCA), including SKU strategy and cost optimisation. \nAble to produce architecture documentation of a standard that withstands external audit and supplier scrutiny. \nProven credibility with both senior engineers and executive stakeholders, in English, in a global matrixed organisation. \nWillingness to travel internationally, approximately 5-15% of the time. \nPreferred Skills:\nIf you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus:\nRelevant certifications such as Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert, Cybersecurity Architect Expert, Identity and Access Administrator, Teams Administrator Expert, Power Platform Solution Architect Expert, Information Protection and Compliance Administrator, TOGAF, CISSP.\nExperience in a regulated industry - pharmaceutical, life sciences, biotech, financial services or healthcare - with practical GxP/CSV/CSA, Annex 11 / 21 CFR Part 11, and validated-collaboration-system exposure. \nWorks Council and employee-representation engagement in European jurisdictions - particularly around productivity telemetry, Viva Insights and AI features. \nRecords management and archiving at enterprise scale, including third-party archive platforms and journaling. \nTeams Phone / voice architecture - Direct Routing, Operator Connect, PSTN migration from legacy telephony. \nViva suite architecture - Connections, Engage, Learning, Insights - including the privacy design that makes Insights acceptable. \nLeading a major platform transformation: on-premises to cloud migration, tenant consolidation, or M&A integration/divestment of an M365 tenant. \nThird-party collaboration platform rationalisation - Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, Box, Dropbox coexistence or retirement. \nEnterprise application integration - SaaS integration patterns with M365, iPaaS, API management, and the identity implications of each. \nAccessibility designed into the collaboration experience rather than remediated after complaint. \nFinOps for SaaS - licence optimisation, chargeback/showback models, and true-up negotiation support. \nContribution to the wider community - open-source tooling, conference speaking, published technical writing, Microsoft customer advisory boards or MVP status. \nOther Job-Related Skills/Background:\nDeep technical breadth across the M365 workload estate and the Entra ID / Purview controls that govern it, with the judgement to know where tenant-wide standardisation matters and where a business exception is defensible. \nAdvanced PowerShell and Microsoft Graph API fluency - including delta queries, permissions and app-only auth patterns - plus at least one general-purpose language (Python, C#) applied to real automation. \nTelemetry and reporting craft - M365 usage analytics, Graph Data Connect, Log Analytics/KQL, Power BI - designing measurement into the platform from day one. \nArchitectural discipline - reference designs, ADRs, HLD/LLD, written clearly enough that engineers can build from them and external auditors can accept them. \nTrade-off reasoning - collaboration velocity vs. information risk, capability vs. licence cost, standardisation vs. business exception; comfortable quantifying the uncomfortable option. \nScale intuition - designing for 50,000 users, terabyte-scale content estates, tenant-wide blast radius, and the long tail of exceptions that always exists. \nTechnical leadership without authority - landing decisions across engineering, security, legal, privacy, HR and vendors through credibility and evidence. \nExecutive communication - making platform architecture legible and decision-ready for non-technical leadership. \nConstructive challenge - able to disagree with a Director, Microsoft, or a security architect and keep the relationship intact.\nClosing Date for Applications: Sunday 1st November 2026 (COB)\nPlease take a copy of the Job Description, as this will not be available post closure of the advert. \nWhen applying for this role, please use the ‘cover letter’ of the online application or your CV to describe how you meet the competencies for this role, as outlined in the job requirements above. The information that you have provided in your cover letter and CV will be used to assess your application.\nDuring the course of your application, you will be requested to complete voluntary information which will be used in monitoring the effectiveness of our equality and diversity policies. Your information will be treated as confidential and will not be used in any part of the selection process. If you require a reasonable adjustment to the application / selection process to enable you to demonstrate your ability to perform the job requirements, please contact 0808 234 4391. This will help us to understand any modifications we may need to make to support you throughout our selection process.\n#AGTech\nSkills\nCloud Computing, Container Orchestration, Data Center Management, DevOps, Disaster Recovery (DR), Identity Access Management (IAM), Information Technology (IT) Risk Management, Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Network Design, Serverless Platforms, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Storage Area Network (SAN), System Monitors, Technical Architecture, Technical Architecture Design, Virtualization, Zero Trust ArchitectureWhy GSK?\nUniting science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together.\nGSK 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.\nWe get ahead of disease by preventing and treating it with innovation in specialty medicines and vaccines. 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