Senior Principal - Automation Process Architect

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 Process Automation Architect determines what should be automated before anything is built. The role analyses end-to-end technology processes across CTO to find inefficiency, manual effort and automation or AI hotspots, quantifies the opportunity, and architects the redesigned process so that automation improves the work rather than encoding the current way of doing it.

This is the front end of the hub's pipeline. It works alongside the other three intake dimensions of workforce, workbench and digital platform, and hands prioritised, evidenced use cases to the Director, Automation Engineering / Product Manager for delivery. Solution build sits with the engineering squad, patterns and enablement with the Principal Automation Enablement Lead, and the processes themselves remain owned by the teams that run them.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyse end-to-end technology processes across CTO to identify inefficiency, manual effort, handoff friction and automation or AI hotspots.
• Quantify the opportunity in each case, covering effort, cycle time, error rate and cost, so that use cases can be compared on evidence, not enthusiasm.
• Architect the redesigned process, deciding what should be removed, simplified, automated or made agentic, and in what sequence.
• Challenge automation that would encode a poor process, and make the case for fixing the process first where that is the better answer.
• Assess processes for agentic readiness, including whether decisions within them can be made safely by an agent and what human oversight is required.
• Work with the workforce, workbench and digital platform analysis so that the four intake dimensions produce one coherent set of prioritised use cases.
• Hand evidenced, prioritised use cases to the Director, Automation Engineering / Product Manager, with the process design and expected outcome defined.
• Partner with the process owners in RE and Operations, platform teams and Service Owners, who own the processes being changed and must adopt the redesign.
• Define the measurement approach for each automation, so realised benefit can be tested against the opportunity claimed at the outset.
• Ensure redesigned processes remain compliant with control, audit and regulated requirements, including GxP where relevant, and that automation does not weaken the control.
• Build process analysis capability in the platform domains over time, so hotspot identification does not depend permanently on the hub.
• Hold the boundaries with the process owners on the processes themselves, the SRE Principal, Automation and Toil Reduction on reliability toil inside Reliability Engineering, the Director, Automation Engineering / Product Manager on what gets built, the Principal, Automation Enablement Lead on patterns, and Service Owners on operational service standards.

Education & Professional Qualifications

• Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Business Process Management, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Professional certifications desirable (e.g., Lean Six Sigma, process mining or business process management accreditation, ITIL or an equivalent service management qualification).

Job Experience:

• Typically 15+ years in process architecture, process improvement, business analysis or automation consulting within technology.
• Experience analysing end-to-end processes and quantifying automation opportunity with evidence, not estimate.
• Experience redesigning processes, not simply automating them as they stand.
• Experience assessing where a decision can safely be made by automation and where human oversight must remain.
• Experience of technology and service management processes such as incident, change, request and provisioning.
• Experience working within regulated control requirements, including where automation affects an audited process.
• Experience defining benefit measurement and testing realised outcomes against the original case.
• Familiarity with process mining or equivalent analytical tooling.

Desirable

• Working knowledge of GxP, regulatory, and data-governance requirements shaping AI deployment in pharma.
• Background documenting processes and workflows, and redesigning how work gets done.
• Experience with product development and discovery phases

Preferred Skills:

• Strong analytical rigour, able to quantify an opportunity rather than assert it.
• Willingness to conclude that a process should be fixed or removed instead of automated.
• Ability to challenge process owners constructively about how their own work is done.

• Clear documentation and process modelling capability.
• Understanding of what agents can and cannot be trusted to decide.
• Awareness of control and audit requirements, so that redesign does not weaken assurance.

Skills

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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