Senior Director, Distinguished Engineer – SDLC and Autonomous Development, DevCMO Tech

Job description

Are you a recognized leader in modern software engineering, with the technical depth and the credibility to change how a large engineering organization builds software? Do you want to lead the move to autonomous, AI-driven development at GSK, and prove its value with evidence? Do you want to apply this to Clinical Trials technology, to deliver faster, reduce risk and optimize cost and timelines? We'd like to hear from you if you think you might make a good fit! Job Purpose This is a senior leadership and technical authority role for the evolution of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) across DevCMO Tech engineering. You will set the direction for, and lead the adoption of, autonomous development tools such as Cursor Cloud Agents and Cognition, or comparable platforms, so that engineering teams can make their development process progressively more autonomous. This supports strategic programs to improve patient enrolment in clinical trials and accelerate regulatory submissions using AI and modern tooling You will do this by working inside engineering teams and across organizational boundaries. You will be hands-on with the tools and the Azure and GCP infrastructure behind them, and you will gather the evidence that shows what they deliver. You will lead a small team and work closely with other architects, engineers, product teams, R&D Tech central services, and Security, Quality and Regulatory partners. Key Responsibilities: Technical direction and tooling Set the technical strategy for autonomous development across DevCMO Tech, and evaluate tools such as Cursor Cloud Agents, Cognition or similar through hands-on proofs of concept. Recommend what to adopt based on value, security, compliance and cost. Lead the implementation of approved tools, including environments, access and permissions, guardrails, and cost and usage monitoring. Integrate autonomous agents into collaboration and delivery tooling, including Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps (work items, repos, pull requests, pipelines and approvals), so agents can take work from backlog to reviewed code with appropriate human oversight. Architect and oversee the Azure and GCP cloud infrastructure that supports these tools, including identity, networking, secrets management, sandboxed execution environments and observability. Keep autonomous development practices compliant with GSK Security, Quality and Regulatory (GxP) standards, including audit trails, traceability and validation expectations. Embedding, influence and adoption Embed with engineering teams for periods of time to understand how they work, introduce the tools and practices, and coach them through the change. Work across organizational boundaries (engineering groups, product teams, central services, Security, Quality, Regulatory and partners) to build alignment and get buy-in for process change. Define and share best practices, reference architectures, patterns and playbooks (e.g. task specification, agent guardrails, review of agent-generated changes and testing expectations) that help teams make development more autonomous. Build communities of practice, run demos and workshops, and present clearly to engineers and to senior executives. Proving and reporting productivity gains Establish baselines before adoption, then measure and show the productivity gains from autonomous development. Report the evidence to senior leaders and use it to guide where to invest next. Gather evidence across four areas, for example: Delivery flow: cycle time, lead time, pull request throughput, and DORA metrics (deployment frequency, change failure rate and time to recover). Example: cycle time from work item to merged pull request before and after agent adoption. Quality and rework: defect escape rate, test coverage, code review turnaround and rework rate. Example: the share of agent-generated pull requests merged without major rework. Developer experience and adoption: developer surveys, active usage by team, and the share of work items completed by agents. Example: survey results and usage trends by team over successive quarters. Cost and business outcomes: cost per change, engineering hours saved, and time to deliver key clinical trial and regulatory milestones. Example: hours saved per release compared with the cost of the tools and cloud infrastructure. Communicate results honestly, including where tools do not deliver, and adjust the approach based on the evidence. Leadership Lead and develop a small team of engineers and architects, and provide technical direction to teams made up of GSK FTEs, strategic partners and software vendors. Keep up with a fast-moving market, run experiments, and keep technical documentation and decisions up to date to support audits and reviews. Why you? Basic Qualifications: We are looking for professionals with these required skills to achieve our goals: Bachelor’s degree in Computer science or related technical discipline. Experience in modern software engineering and developer productivity, with a track record of leading enterprise-wide change in engineering practices. Experience with autonomous or agentic coding tools, such as Cursor (including Cloud Agents), Cognition or similar platforms. Experience with Azure DevOps (repos, boards, pipelines) and integrating it with other tools through APIs and automation. Experience in integrating engineering workflows with Microsoft Teams (e.g. bots, notifications, approvals and workflow automation). Experience in designing and operating solutions on both Azure and GCP cloud infrastructure. Experience in DevOps and automation: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerisation (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes) and Git-based workflows. Experience in exceptional communication, negotiation and influencing skills, with evidence of gaining buy-in for change across teams and organizational boundaries, including by embedding in teams. Experience in leading and developing teams, and technical leadership of teams that include partners and vendors. Experience in security and identity practices for cloud and AI tooling (e.g. OAuth, secrets management, least privilege and access controls). Preferred Qualifications: If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus: Experience in regulated environments, with awareness of GxP, audit review and validation requirements and Privileged Access Management. Experience with AI/ML and LLM-based tooling, such as prompt and context engineering, MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent evaluation. Experience defining governance and guardrails for AI-assisted development, such as quality gates and cost controls. Familiarity with R&D, clinical development or pharmaceutical technology, including clinical trial systems and regulatory submissions. A public profile in the engineering community, such as conference talks, publications or open source contributions. Experience delivering and integrating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and working with software vendors and strategic partners. #AGTech #GSK-LI Skills Computer Programming, Data Analysis, Data Architecture Development, Databricks Unified Data Analytics Platform, Data Engineering, Data Governance, Data Ingestion, Data Integration, Data Migrations, Data Modeling, Data Transformation, ETL Development, Performance Optimizations, Performance Tuning, Structured Query Language (SQL) 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. Peop