Description
The Senior Principal Platform Engineer – DevSecOps / DevEx is the senior technical owner of GSK’s Modern Engineering platforms: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, GitHub Enterprise, Azure DevOps, observability and the Nuro AIOps control plane.
You run them as secure, self-service products. You set the engineering standard, build golden paths and infrastructure as code instead of manual configuration, and engineer reliability through SLOs, observability and automation.
Key Responsibilities
- Platform ownership: run each platform as a product with SLOs, a capacity plan and a lifecycle (patching, upgrades, end-of-life).
- Reliability: achieve 99.9% availability for tier-1 platforms.
- Everything as code: manage platform config, policies, pipelines and dashboards in Git through Terraform, Ansible, Helm and GitOps.
- Secure by default: enforce SSO, least-privilege RBAC, secrets management, signed artefacts, branch protection and supply-chain controls.
- Golden paths: build reusable templates, pipelines and automation content for developer platforms.
- AI Agentic automation: Design and code agentic AI agents for self-healing and autonomous operations.
- Compliance: keep platforms in a validated state for GxP, SOX and data-privacy controls.
- Toolchain rationalisation: be the technical lead for the platforms strategy.
- Developer experience: measure and improve DORA metrics and platform NPS.
- Leadership: set and uphold engineering standards in design and code review.
Education & Professional Qualifications
- Degree in a technology or engineering discipline.
- Relevant technical certifications desirable.
Experience Required
- Overall, 15 years and Typically 6-8 years in platform, infrastructure or software engineering.
- Proven experience as a DevOps, Cloud Engineer with design experience.
- Proficient in building solutions using container services.
Desirable:
- Certifications in cloud platforms.
- Familiarity with multi-cloud deployments.
- Understanding of AKS & GKE security practices.
- Knowledge of Pharma practices, GxP, Validation, Audit readiness.
Skills/Background
- Automation-first instinct.
- Code review discipline.
- Mentoring ability with engineers.
- Judgement about when AI-generated code is fit to merge.
- Customer mindset toward consuming teams.
- Willingness to make technical debt and its cost visible.