Associate Director, Service Ops Lead - Talent and L&D

Job description

About the Team: Enterprise Systems is the backbone of GSK’s internal operations in Digital & Tech, enabling GSK Global Functions teams such as Finance, Procurement, HR, Legal, Compliance, WREF, CGA and Corporate Secretariat to run seamlessly. This team designs and delivers cutting-edge digital platforms that power critical processes, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and scalability across the enterprise. Our HR Digital & Tech team transforms how GSK attracts, develops, and retains talent through innovative technology solutions. From managing global HR platforms to delivering data-driven insights, this function ensures our people have the tools and experiences they need to thrive. Partnering closely with HR business teams, we create solutions that simplify processes, enhance employee engagement, and enable strategic workforce planning. If you’re passionate about technology that empowers people, this is where you can make an impact. Job Purpose: The Associate Director, Service Operations Lead – Talent & L&D is responsible for ensuring the stable, compliant, and reliable operation of select systems and platforms within the HR Digital & Tech domain. The role oversees day-to-day platform operations and ensures that processes are followed, risks are managed, and changes are delivered safely. It maintains the operational performance of multiple platforms (e.g. SuccessFactors), ensuring they meet agreed service levels and adhere to security and compliance expectations. The role also provides leadership across operational service teams and partner-delivered support services, ensuring effective service delivery, proactive issue management, continuous improvement, and strong coordination across business, technology, security, infrastructure, product, and vendor teams. This role operates under GSK's "Performance with Choice" hybrid working approach, typically expecting 2–3 days per week in the office, with the specific pattern agreed between the successful candidate and their manager based on role and team needs. Key Responsibilities: Provide operational leadership across Talent & Data platforms, ensuring system stability, availability, and adherence to service levels, acting as the primary internal escalation point for product and domain teams on service performance and major incidents. Govern incident, problem, change, configuration, and release processes for domain platforms, ensuring operational compliance with ITSM policies and control frameworks, and defining measurable outcomes for problem management (e.g., RCA closure time, recurrence prevention, defect trend reduction). Define and maintain service readiness and runbook quality standards (e.g. ServiceNow Knowledge), ensuring escalation paths, support tasks, data handling, continuity steps, and deployment impacts are captured and validated before go-live. Create and oversee service plans for new and enhanced products, coordinating with Product Owners, third-party partners, and platform/service teams to define SLAs, performance expectations, and support handover criteria. Monitor platform performance, proactively identifying risks, trends, and recurring issues, and implement improvement actions to strengthen stability and user experience. Coordinate with Platform Owners, engineering squads, solution architects, and service teams to ensure changes, integrations, upgrades, and releases are deployed safely and meet operational readiness standards. Lead operational readiness assessments, ensuring documentation, support models, monitoring coverage, and non-functional controls are in place prior to deployment. Own operational dashboards, KPIs, and reporting for the platforms, ensuring performance, risks, and issues are communicated to senior stakeholders. Oversee root cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring sustainable fixes, clear remediation actions, and preventative measures are identified and delivered. Maintain and continuously improve operational documentation, including runbooks, support procedures, configuration inventories, and architectural operational views. Manage relationships with third-party vendors and managed service providers to ensure high-quality operational support and fulfilment of contractual obligations. Lead, mentor, and coordinate operational support teams and partner resources across areas such as service desk, platform support, infrastructure, cloud services, and application operations, ensuring clear accountability, timely delivery, and effective escalation management. Collaborate with security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, product, and engineering teams to ensure access controls, data handling, cyber security requirements, operational controls, and compliance standards are embedded into day-to-day service operations. Where required, support extended operational coverage, escalation, or on-call arrangements for critical incidents, major releases, or high-priority business events. Lead your team in using approved AI tools to improve productivity and ways of working, role-modelling responsible use and follow GSK’s Responsible AI, privacy and security requirements. Required Skills & Qualification: 15–19 years of experience in platform operations, system administration, IT service management, or technical delivery within complex enterprise environments, ideally supporting SuccessFactors, Degreed, or similar HR/L&D platforms. Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Systems Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience. Strong knowledge of platform operations, ITSM, cloud technologies, system integrations, monitoring, security, compliance, resilience, and business continuity. Proven experience managing incident, problem, change, release, and configuration management, including root cause analysis and continuous improvement. Hands-on experience with ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps, monitoring platforms, knowledge management tools, or similar enterprise technologies. Experience leading operational support across multiple platforms and coordinating with engineering, architecture, product, service desk, infrastructure, cloud, and third-party teams. Strong service-management experience across SLAs, KPIs, operational dashboards, incident trends, service performance, and operational risk indicators. Experience managing vendors, managed service providers, and SaaS partners, including escalations, service quality, and continuous improvement. Experience developing operational documentation such as runbooks, support procedures, and operational readiness assessments. Experience working in Agile/DevOps and fast-paced environments, ensuring continuous delivery while maintaining platform reliability and user experience. Relevant certifications such as ITIL, AWS/cloud, Agile/Scrum, DevOps Foundations, or equivalent are desirable. Preferred Skills: Strong analytical and problem-solving capability, especially in complex operational scenarios. Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to provide clarity during incidents and complex change cycles. Strong understanding of security, compliance, and operational risk controls. Ability to lead cross-functional teams, influence without direct authority, and promote operational discipline. Effective organisational skills, able to balance multiple priorities and manage time-sensitive escalations. Strong leadership and coaching capability, with the ability to develop others, build collaboration, and create a high-performing service culture. Strong vendor, stakeholder, and relationship management skills, with the ability to influence outcomes and drive accountability across internal and external teams. Ability to work flexibly across time zones and support critical service events, releases, or escalations where required. Ability to work in a very fast-paced and fluid environment Comfortable with ambiguity and change Skills Degreed (Platform), Human Resou