Description
The Senior Director owns a Branch and Campus Platform as a long-lived product rather than a project, setting its strategy and roadmap, leading the team that builds and runs it, and making it easy and safe for GSK to consume through self-service.
The role balances new capability, reliability and cost, runs lean portfolio management for the platform, and holds unit-cost transparency and FinOps for it.
Key responsibilities:
- Set the platform vision and multi-year roadmap, linking every initiative explicitly to GSK Business and D&T strategy and to a measurable outcome.
- Run lean portfolio management for the platform, prioritising by value and risk and steering with OKRs and flow metrics rather than fixed project plans.
- Treat the platform as a product with internal GSK teams as customers, driving self-service adoption so consumption does not depend on the platform team's availability.
- Embed AI into how the platform is built and run, using AI-assisted engineering and intelligent operations to accelerate delivery and reduce toil, measured rather than asserted.
- Partner with Reliability Engineering to hold the shared reliability bar, owning the platform's SLOs and error budgets.
- Own FinOps and unit-cost transparency for the platform, working with the Tech Finance Manager and acting where unit economics deteriorate.
- Lead, grow and develop the platform team across engineering, architecture and product, managing performance, capability and succession.
- Govern supplier and managed-service contributions to the platform, holding them to the same OKRs, service levels and reliability standards as internal work.
- Hold Product Owners to outcome and adoption measures rather than to feature delivery, and resolve prioritisation conflicts between products.
- Report platform adoption, reliability, roadmap predictability and unit cost to the Head of Platform Domain on evidence.
- Represent platform demand and constraint into the domain portfolio run by the Domain Portfolio Manager.
- Hold the boundaries with the Product Owners on product backlogs, the Platform Architect on technical design, and the Head of Platform Domain on domain strategy and investment.
Requirements:
- Degree in a technology, engineering or business discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- Significant experience in technology, including leading platform, product or engineering teams with delivery accountability.
- Experience owning a platform or product roadmap and being answerable for adoption rather than delivery alone.
- Practical experience of product-centric or lean portfolio operating models rather than project-based delivery only.
- Domain depth in cloud, network or digital workplace sufficient to challenge the engineering team's technical judgement.
- Track record of reliability accountability, working to SLOs and error budgets with a reliability function.
- Commercial and FinOps experience, including acting on unit-cost deterioration.
- Experience governing supplier or managed-service contributions to a platform against agreed outcomes.
- Significant experience leading enterprise branch, campus, local area network and wireless services.
- Strong knowledge of Cisco or Juniper switching and wireless, including secure operational technology connectivity.
Desirable requirements:
- Product, agile or cloud certifications desirable (e.g., SAFe, a recognised cloud certification relevant to the platform, or FinOps Certified Practitioner).
- Product or platform management qualification, such as SAFe Agile Product Management.
- Experience managing investment, lifecycle and commercial decisions for a global network platform.
- Professional level Cisco or Juniper knowledge supported by certification or equivalent experience.
Benefits:
- Access to learning and development to grow both technical and leadership skills.
- Supportive team that values clear communication and practical problem solving.
- Opportunity to work on technology that enables critical work across the company and helps improve healthcare outcomes.