Senior Principal Cloud Foundations Engineer – Automation

Job description

Business Introduction GSK remains committed to achieving bold commercial ambitions for the future. By 2031, we aim to deliver £40 billion in annual sales, leveraging our existing strong performance momentum to significantly increase our positive impact on the health of billions of patients globally. Our Ahead Together strategy is centred on early intervention to prevent and alter the course of disease, thereby protecting people and supporting healthcare systems. Our diverse portfolio consists of vaccines, specialty medicines, and general medicines. Through continuous innovation and a dedicated focus on scientific and technical excellence, we strive to develop and launch new, groundbreaking treatments that address critical health challenges. Job Purpose The Principal Cloud Foundations Engineer – Automation builds and runs the Internal Hosting Portal, with a focus on its server side and workflow automation, that allows application teams across GSK to provision and manage Cloud resources in a self-service manner.  The Hosting Portal is a custom-built web application using a modern  tech stack based on TypeScript. The automation engineer sets the engineering standard within that platform, owns the portal’s APIs, integrations and workflow orchestration, mentors the engineers around them, and treats the teams who consume the platform as customers. The role works through automated software deployment rather than manual configuration, uses AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing, and engineers reliability in by defining SLOs, instrumenting for observability and automating away toil. testing, and engineers reliability in by defining SLOs, instrumenting for observability and automating away toil. The role also connects the Hosting Portal to the enterprise infrastructure-as-code platform, so that teams starting their cloud journey in the portal are onboarded to it and can discover its golden paths. This is the senior hands-on engineering role in the platform team, insourced at the grades covered by this description while engineering at G7b and below is delivered through managed service partners, so the role integrates and assures partner components as well as building. Engineering roadmap and direction sit with the Engineering Director, reference architecture and standards sit with the Platform Architect, backlog order sits with the Product Owner, and deep reliability engineering sits with the Site Reliability Engineer deployed from Reliability Engineering & Operations. Key Responsibilities Design, build and automate the provisioning of foundational infrastructure resources through the portal’s services, integrations and workflows, using infrastructure-as-code and golden paths, so that provisioning is repeatable rather than reconstructed each time. Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing to accelerate delivery and raise quality, reviewing AI-generated output before it is merged. Build self-service capabilities and paved roads that reduce friction for consuming teams, so adoption does not depend on the platform team's availability. Engineer for reliability by defining SLOs, instrumenting services and workflows for observability and automating to reduce toil, working with the Site Reliability Engineer on standards. Set and uphold engineering standards, secure-by-default practices and code quality within the platform, and hold them in code review. Contribute to incident response and drive permanent automated fixes with Reliability Engineering rather than repeating manual recovery. Mentor and technically lead other engineers, including partner engineers, linking engineering work to platform OKRs and outcomes. Integrate and assure supplier or managed-service components, holding partner-delivered engineering to the same standards and code quality as internal work. Work the platform's manual task and toil backlog, converting identified candidates into automation and evidencing the effort removed. Close observability coverage gaps for the platform, so that reliability can be measured rather than inferred. Contribute engineering-led items to the platform backlog held by the Product Owner, including technical debt, upgrade and automation work, with the cost of not doing them stated. Apply the reference architectures and patterns set by the Platform Architect, and raise a case for change rather than diverging locally. Education & Professional Qualifications Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics). Relevant technical certifications desirable (e.g., a recognised cloud certification for AWS, GCP or Azure, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or a network vendor certification relevant to the platform). Area of Specialisation Hands-on platform engineering in cloud, network or digital workplace, covering infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and containers where relevant. Automation-first and secure-by-default engineering, with an SRE mindset covering SLOs, observability and toil reduction. Why is this level of Education Required? Deep engineering credentials are needed because the role sets the engineering standard other engineers and partner teams build to, and that standard has to hold under code review rather than by assertion. Related Experience Required Typically 8-10 years in cloud, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team. Excellent knowledge and hands on experience with TypeScript (ES6+) and Node.js server-side development. Developed REST and GraphQL APIs based on Node.js (Express). Integrating with cloud provider and third-party APIs, with retries, idempotency and error handling for long-running operations. Designing and automating long-running, multi-step processes (retries, timeouts, compensation, human approval steps) using a workflow orchestration or durable-execution approach. Working knowledge of landing zones and serverless technologies across Azure and GCP. Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept. Building and deploying through CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) with Docker, and operating services on Microsoft Azure (App Service, Application Insights). Track record building self-service capability that other teams adopted without hand-holding. Experience instrumenting for observability, defining SLOs and reducing toil through automation. Experience with AI-assisted engineering tooling, including judgement about when generated output is not fit to merge. Good knowledge and hands on experience with HTML5, CSS3 (including preprocessors) Good knowledge and hands on experience with React, NextJS, GraphQL, Yoga, Prisma ORM, and Apollo Client. Previous experience in developing a React UIs with Mantine, Material UI, or Chakra UI. Familiar with popular patterns and libraries such as React Hooks,  and server-state management (Apollo Client, TanStack Query). Previously developed schema-based forms either custom or based on a library such as react-hook-form or Formik, including data validator libraries such as Yup, Zod or JOI. Knowledge of modern authentication and authorization mechanisms such as OAuth v2 or SAML and JSON Web Token and libraries such as MSAL. Strong experience with test automation (unit & integration) tools such as Jest and Cypress. Desirable: Previously worked in a central IT team within a regulated environment such as the Pharmaceutical or Finance industry, including knowledge of GxP, validation and audit readiness. undefined Workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, Camunda, Azure Durable Functions or AWS Step Functions. Experience with internal developer platforms, self-service portals or golden-path catalogues (e.g., Backstage). Building LLM-powered features (tool use / MCP). Scripting in Python and PowerShell. Skills/Background Autom