Description
GSK is seeking a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer - DB to build and run Database Services as automated, secure, self-service infrastructure. The successful candidate will set engineering standards, mentor engineers, and treat consuming teams as customers.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and automate platform infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and golden paths
- Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review, and testing
- Build self-service capabilities and paved roads to reduce friction for consuming teams
- Engineer for reliability by defining SLOs, instrumenting platforms for observability, and automating toil
- Set and uphold engineering standards, secure-by-default practices, and code quality within the platform
- Contribute to incident response and drive permanent automated fixes
- Mentor and technically lead other engineers, including partner engineers
- Integrate and assure supplier or managed-service components
- Work on the platform's manual task and toil backlog
- Close observability coverage gaps for the platform
- Contribute engineering-led items to the platform backlog
- Apply reference architectures and patterns set by the Platform Architect
Education & Professional Qualifications:
- Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience
- Relevant technical certifications desirable
Area of Specialisation:
- Hands-on platform engineering in cloud, network, or digital workplace
- Automation-first and secure-by-default engineering, with an SRE mindset
Related Experience Required:
- Overall, 15 years and typically 6-8 years in cloud, infrastructure, or software engineering
- Strong experience as Database Engineer and/or Architect
- Deep understanding of Relational Database technologies
- Understanding of modern database & storage technologies
- Experience as a DBA
- Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, and with containers and Kubernetes
- 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
Desirable:
- Proficient in building solutions using container services
- Hands-on experience deploying container solutions
- Familiarity with multi-cloud deployments
- Familiarity and hands-on with Traditional Database Products
- Knowledge of cloud cost methodology
- Knowledge of Pharma practices, GxP, Validation, Audit readiness
Skills/Background:
- Automation-first instinct
- Code review discipline
- Mentoring ability with engineers of varying experience
- Judgement about when AI-generated code is fit to merge
- Customer mindset toward consuming teams
- Willingness to make technical debt and its cost visible