Senior Principal - SRE Principal, Automation & Toil Reduction

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 SRE Principal, Automation & Toil Reduction leads the engineering of automation that removes repetitive operational work and improves the reliability, resilience and efficiency of GSK platforms. The role acts as a hands-on principal SRE, shaping reusable automation patterns, enabling safe autonomous operations and embedding measurable toil reduction across platform domains. The role sits in Reliability Engineering & Operations and works across platform domains through a hub-and-spoke model. It owns the enterprise approach for identifying, baselining and prioritising toil, and converts high-value candidates into production-grade automation for diagnostics, remediation, recovery, fulfilment and compliance workflows. Platform build direction remains with Principal Engineers and Engineering Directors, major incident command remains with the Major Incident Manager, and the central reliability and automation standard is set by the Reliability Engineering Senior Director. Automation outcomes and priorities are agreed jointly with Platform Managers and Product Owners. Key Responsibilities •        Own and evolve the enterprise SRE automation and toil-reduction strategy, roadmap, reference patterns and engineering standards. •        Establish a consistent toil taxonomy and measurement approach using operational data, service-management evidence, task frequency, effort, risk and business impact. •        Prioritise automation candidates by hours avoided, repeatability, reliability risk, human-error exposure, control value, delivery complexity and reuse potential. •        Design and build secure, reusable automation for provisioning, diagnostics, incident triage, remediation, recovery, capacity, patching, service requests and compliance evidence. •        Create APIs, event-driven integrations, workflows, infrastructure-as-code modules, runbook automation and self-service capabilities rather than isolated scripts. •        Engineer closed-loop and AI-assisted operations with strong telemetry, policy controls, confidence thresholds, auditability and human approval for higher-risk actions. •        Establish production guardrails covering identity, least privilege, secrets, testing, change integration, release, rollback, failure containment and support ownership. •        Instrument automation to measure success, failure, latency, coverage, adoption, exceptions, cost and reliability impact end to end. •        Integrate automation with observability, ITSM, CI/CD, configuration, orchestration and knowledge platforms to reduce hand-offs and context switching. •        Use incident, problem and post-incident evidence to identify recurring failure modes and convert them into permanent engineering fixes or automated prevention. •        Partner with service and platform owners to define SLOs for automation-enabled services and use error-budget and risk evidence to prioritise reliability work. •        Lead technical design reviews for high-impact automation and prevent unsafe, brittle or low-value automation from becoming operational debt. •        Coach engineers, publish reusable patterns and grow an automation community of practice across internal and supplier teams. •        Provide technical oversight of supplier-delivered automation and ensure GSK retains maintainable code, documentation, telemetry, security evidence and knowledge. •        Track outcomes including toil ratio, capacity returned, automation adoption, cycle time, repeat incidents, MTTR, human-error reduction and control effectiveness. Professional Qualifications •        Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience, such as Computer Science or Software Engineering. •        Relevant cloud, Kubernetes, DevOps, SRE, security, IT service management or automation certifications are desirable. Area of Specialisation •        Site reliability engineering, toil management and operations automation at enterprise scale. •        Software engineering for production operations, including APIs, event-driven integration, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, testing and observability. •        AIOps and safe autonomous operations, including anomaly detection, decision support and governed remediation. Experience Required •        Overall 15 years and degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent practical engineering experience. •        Typically 8 or more years of experience in software, platform, infrastructure or reliability engineering, with substantial hands-on ownership of production services and automation. •        Demonstrated experience converting recurring operational work into reliable, reusable automation with measurable adoption and benefits. •        Advanced programming and automation engineering using Python or an equivalent language, including •        APIs, testing, packaging, error handling and secure coding. •        Deep coding or scripting capability, plus practical experience with APIs, source control, automated testing and CI/CD. •        Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, configuration management or enterprise orchestration. •        Experience instrumenting distributed systems and automation workflows using metrics, logs, traces and events. •        Experience applying SRE practices including SLOs, error budgets, incident management, postmortems, resilience and toil reduction. •        Experience designing safe production automation controls for access, secrets, approvals, change, rollback, audit and ongoing support. •        Experience leading technical design across multiple teams, mentoring experienced engineers and influencing without formal authority. •        Platform engineering depth in at least one domain such as cloud, hosting, networks, containers, databases or digital workplace. Desirable requirements: • Relevant cloud, Kubernetes, DevOps, SRE, security, IT service management or automation certifications. • Experience with AIOps, generative AI or agentic operations, including evaluation, confidence thresholds, guardrails and human-in-the-loop approval. • Experience creating self-service platforms, service catalogues, golden paths or reusable automation products. • Experience with chaos engineering, game days, automated recovery testing, progressive delivery and pre-change or post-change validation. • Experience integrating observability, ITSM, CMDB, CI/CD and orchestration platforms to reduce operational hand-offs. • Experience operating in a global, multi-supplier environment and assuring supplier-delivered code, documentation, telemetry and knowledge transfer. • Experience in pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare or another regulated industry, including GxP or validated systems. • Experience measuring capacity returned, repeat-incident reduction, automation execution success, exception rates, control effectiveness and reuse. Skills/Background •        Principal-level judgement to distinguish genuine toil from valuable engineering work and to know when simplification is better than automation. •        Ability to influence platform, product, operations, security, quality and supplier teams with