Cloud & Hosting - Principal Platform Engineer – QA

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 Platform Engineer – QA will help shape and evolve the organisation's quality engineering platform, enabling teams to build, test, deploy and operate software faster, more securely, and more reliably. The QA role will set the testing and quality standards helping to build test automation that can be adopted across platform and application teams. They will also mentor the engineers around them, and treats the teams who consume the test automation as customers. The role works through infrastructure-as-code and golden paths 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. 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 platform infrastructure 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 platforms 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. Minimum Level of Job-Related Experience Required • Typically 8-10+ years in cloud, platform, devsecops or software engineering, including experience as a senior/principal technical authority on testing • Strong experience in developing Test Automation scripts and Testing Frameworks e.g. SIT, Regression, Unit • Experience in API/UI Testing, IAC Testing and Test Data Strategies • Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept. • Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container platforms, including AKS/GKE, Docker, Helm, service mesh and container security • Expert knowledge of CI/CD and software supply-chain security, including GitHub/GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, artifact management, SBOM, signing, provenance, vulnerability management and automated security gates. • Strong understanding of cloud security architecture, including IAM, secrets, network security, workload protection, policy enforcement and DevSecOps controls. • Experience designing secure self-service/platform-engineering capabilities—reusable modules, APIs and automation consumed by engineering teams at enterprise scale. • 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. Desirable: Experience in AI Testing (LLM Evaluation, Agentic AI Testing, Prompt Injection Testing, Hallucination detection) Knowledge of networking, security, and compliance in cloud environments. Knowledge of Pharma practices, GxP, Validation, Audit readiness and how to optimize delivery to accommodate these critical practices Skills/Background • Automation-first instinct, treating a repeated manual task as a defect rather than as work. • Code review discipline, holding quality without becoming a bottleneck. • Mentoring ability with engineers of varying experience, including partner engineers outside the line. • Judgement about when AI-generated code is fit to merge and when it is not. • Customer mindset toward consuming teams, who can route around a platform that is hard to use. • Willingness to make technical debt and its cost visible rather than absorbing it silently. Skills API Management, Automation Technology, Cloud Architectures, Cloud Financial Operations, Containerization, Database Management, DevOps, Disaster Recovery (DR), Edge Computing, Infrastructure As Code (IaC), Networking Concepts, Performance Optimizations, Serverless Computing, System Monitors, Virtualization 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. People and patients around the world count on the medicines and vaccines we make, so we’re committed to creating an environment where our people can thrive and focus on what matters most. Our culture of being ambitious for patients, accountable for impact and doing the right thing is the foundation for how, together, we deliver for patients, shareholders and our people. Inclusion at GSK: As an employer committed to Inclusion, we encourage you to reach out if you need any adjustments during the recruitment process. Please contact our Recruitment Team at [email protected] to discuss your needs. Important notice to Employment businesses/ Agencies GSK does not accept referrals from employment businesses and/or employment agencies in respect of the vacancies posted on this site. All employment businesses/agencies are required to contact GSK's commercial and general procurement/human resources department to obtain prior written authorization before referring any candidates to GSK. 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