SRE Principal, Automation & Toil Reduction

The SRE Principal, Automation & Toil Reduction leads the engineering of automation that removes repetitive operational work and improves the reliability, resilience and efficiency of GSK platforms.

The role acts as a hands-on principal SRE, shaping reusable automation patterns, enabling safe autonomous operations and embedding measurable toil reduction across platform domains.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the enterprise SRE automation and toil-reduction strategy, roadmap, reference patterns and engineering standards.
• Establish a consistent toil taxonomy and measurement approach using operational data, service-management evidence, task frequency, effort, risk and business impact.
• Prioritise automation candidates by hours avoided, repeatability, reliability risk, human-error exposure, control value, delivery complexity and reuse potential.
• Design and build secure, reusable automation for provisioning, diagnostics, incident triage, remediation, recovery, capacity, patching, service requests and compliance evidence.
• Create APIs, event-driven integrations, workflows, infrastructure-as-code modules, runbook automation and self-service capabilities rather than isolated scripts.
• Engineer closed-loop and AI-assisted operations with strong telemetry, policy controls, confidence thresholds, auditability and human approval for higher-risk actions.
• Establish production guardrails covering identity, least privilege, secrets, testing, change integration, release, rollback, failure containment and support ownership.
• Instrument automation to measure success, failure, latency, coverage, adoption, exceptions, cost and reliability impact end to end.
• Integrate automation with observability, ITSM, CI/CD, configuration, orchestration and knowledge platforms to reduce hand-offs and context switching.
• Use incident, problem and post-incident evidence to identify recurring failure modes and convert them into permanent engineering fixes or automated prevention.
• Partner with service and platform owners to define SLOs for automation-enabled services and use error-budget and risk evidence to prioritise reliability work.
• Lead technical design reviews for high-impact automation and prevent unsafe, brittle or low-value automation from becoming operational debt.
• Coach engineers, publish reusable patterns and grow an automation community of practice across internal and supplier teams.
• Provide technical oversight of supplier-delivered automation and ensure GSK retains maintainable code, documentation, telemetry, security evidence and knowledge.
• Track outcomes including toil ratio, capacity returned, automation adoption, cycle time, repeat incidents, MTTR, human-error reduction and control effectiveness.

Professional Qualifications

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience, such as Computer Science or Software Engineering.
• Relevant cloud, Kubernetes, DevOps, SRE, security, IT service management or automation certifications are desirable.

Area of Specialisation

• Site reliability engineering, toil management and operations automation at enterprise scale.
• Software engineering for production operations, including APIs, event-driven integration, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, testing and observability.
• AIOps and safe autonomous operations, including anomaly detection, decision support and governed remediation.

Experience Required

• Overall 15 years and degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent practical engineering experience.
• Typically 8 or more years of experience in software, platform, infrastructure or reliability engineering, with substantial hands-on ownership of production services and automation.
• Demonstrated experience converting recurring operational work into reliable, reusable automation with measurable adoption and benefits.
• Advanced programming and automation engineering using Python or an equivalent language, including APIs, testing, packaging, error handling and secure coding.

Desirable requirements:

• Relevant cloud, Kubernetes, DevOps, SRE, security, IT service management or automation certifications.
• Experience with AIOps, generative AI or agentic operations, including evaluation, confidence thresholds, guardrails and human-in-the-loop approval.
• Experience creating self-service platforms, service catalogues, golden paths or reusable automation products.
• Experience with chaos engineering, game days, automated recovery testing, progressive delivery and pre-change or post-change validation.
• Experience integrating observability, ITSM, CMDB, CI/CD and orchestration platforms to reduce operational hand-offs.
• Experience operating in a global, multi-supplier environment and assuring supplier-delivered code, documentation, telemetry and knowledge transfer.
• Experience in pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare or another regulated industry, including GxP or validated systems.
• Experience measuring capacity returned, repeat-incident reduction, automation execution success, exception rates, control effectiveness and reuse.