Senior Principal - Platform Engineer LAN

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 Principal Engineer builds and runs GSK's local area network and campus switching platform as automated, secure, self-service infrastructure, sets the engineering standard within that platform, mentors the engineers around them, and treats the teams who consume the platform as customers. The role works through infrastructure-as-code and golden paths rather than manual configuration, uses AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing, and engineers reliability in by defining SLOs, instrumenting for observability and automating away toil.

This is the senior hands-on engineering role in the platform team, working across local area network and campus switching to integrate and assure delivery as well as building. Engineering roadmap and direction sit with the Engineering Director, reference architecture and standards sit with the Platform Architect, backlog order sits with the Product Owner, and deep reliability engineering sits with the Site Reliability Engineer deployed from Reliability Engineering & Operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and automate platform infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and golden paths, so that provisioning is repeatable rather than reconstructed each time.
• Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing to accelerate delivery and raise quality, reviewing AI-generated output before it is merged.
• Build self-service capabilities and paved roads that reduce friction for consuming teams, so adoption does not depend on the platform team's availability.
• Engineer for reliability by defining SLOs, instrumenting platforms for observability and automating to reduce toil, working with the Site Reliability Engineer on standards.
• Set and uphold engineering standards, secure-by-default practices and code quality within the platform, and hold them in code review.
• Contribute to incident response and drive permanent automated fixes with Reliability Engineering rather than repeating manual recovery.
• Mentor and technically lead other engineers, including partner engineers, linking engineering work to platform OKRs and outcomes.
• Integrate and assure supplier or managed-service components, holding partner-delivered engineering to the same standards and code quality as internal work.
• Work the platform's manual task and toil backlog, converting identified candidates into automation and evidencing the effort removed.
• Close observability coverage gaps for the platform, so that reliability can be measured rather than inferred.
• Contribute engineering-led items to the platform backlog held by the Product Owner, including technical debt, upgrade and automation work, with the cost of not doing them stated.
• Apply the reference architectures and patterns set by the Platform Architect, and raise a case for change rather than diverging locally.

Key Relationships/Customers

Business Stakeholders

• Internal GSK teams consuming the platform as customers of its self-service capability
• Quality and compliance functions where the platform supports GxP activity

Tech Stakeholders

• Engineering Director as line manager and owner of the engineering roadmap
• Platform Architect for reference architectures, patterns and standards
• Product Owner for backlog order and acceptance of engineering-led items
• Site Reliability Engineer and Reliability Engineering & Operations for SLOs, observability and incident prevention
• Other Principal Engineers and platform engineers across the domain

Other

• Managed service partners contributing engineering capacity to the platform.
• Technology vendors during evaluation and proof of concept

Professional Qualifications

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics).
• Relevant technical certifications desirable (e.g., a recognised cloud certification for AWS, GCP or Azure, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or a network vendor certification relevant to the platform).

Area of Specialisation

• Hands-on platform engineering in cloud, network or digital workplace, covering infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and containers where relevant.
• Automation-first and secure-by-default engineering, with an SRE mindset covering SLOs, observability and toil reduction.

Why is this level of Education Required?

• Deep engineering credentials are needed because the role sets the engineering standard other engineers and partner teams build to, and that standard has to hold under code review rather than by assertion.

Experience Required

• Overall 15 years typically 6-8 years in platform, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team.
• Deep hands-on depth in the relevant platform domain, whether cloud and hosting, network or digital workplace.
• Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, and with containers and Kubernetes where relevant to the platform.
• Track record building self-service capability that other teams adopted without hand-holding.
• Experience instrumenting for observability, defining SLOs and reducing toil through automation.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering tooling, including judgement about when generated output is not fit to merge.
• Extensive experience engineering enterprise local area networks and campus switching services.
• Strong knowledge of routing, switching, segmentation, resilience and complex fault diagnosis.
• Evidence of applying standards and automation to improve deployment quality, reliability or supportability.

Desirable Requirements

• Professional level enterprise networking certification, such as CCNP Enterprise or JNCIP Enterprise Routing and Switching.
• Experience with application programming interfaces, infrastructure as code or network assurance platforms.
• Experience supporting manufacturing, laboratory or operational technology networks.

Skills/Background

• Automation-first instinct, treating a repeated manual task as a defect rather than as work.
• Code review discipline, holding quality without becoming a bottleneck.
• Mentoring ability with engineers of varying experience, including partner engineers outside the line.
• Judgement about when AI-generated code is fit to merge and when it is not.
• Customer mindset toward consuming teams, who can route around a platform that is hard to use.
• Willingness to make technical debt and its cost visible rather than absorbing it silently.

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.

Important notice to Employment businesses/ Agencies

GSK does not accept referrals from employment businesses and/or employment agencies in respect of the vacancies posted on this site. All employment businesses/agencies are required to contact GSK's commercial and general procurement/human resources department to obtain prior written authorization before referring any candidates to GSK. The obtaining of prior written authorization is a condition precedent to any agreement (verbal or written) between the employment business/ agency and GSK. In the absence of such written authorization being obtained any actions undertaken by the employment business/agency shall be deemed to have been performed without the consent or contractual agreement of GSK. GSK shall therefore not be liable for any fees arising from such actions or any fees arising from any referrals by employment businesses/agencies in respect of the vacancies posted on this site.

It has come to our attention that the names of GlaxoSmithKline or GSK or our group companies are being used in connection with bogus job advertisements or through unsolicited emails asking candidates to make some payments for recruitment opportunities and interview. Please be advised that such advertisements and emails are not connected with the GlaxoSmithKline group in any way.

GlaxoSmithKline does not charge any fee whatsoever for recruitment process. Please do not make payments to any individuals / entities in connection with recruitment with any GlaxoSmithKline (or GSK) group company at any worldwide location. Even if they claim that the money is refundable.

If you come across unsolicited email from email addresses not ending in gsk.com or job advertisements which state that you should contact an email address that does not end in “gsk.com”, you should disregard the same and inform us by emailing [email protected], so that we can confirm to you if the job is genuine.