Senior Principal Platform Engineer – QA
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Skills
About the role
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 Senior 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.
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
Quality strategy and architecture
- Define the platform quality engineering strategy, test pyramid and quality gates for all cloud platform products.
- Set standards for testing infrastructure-as-code: static analysis, policy-as-code, unit, integration and end-to-end tests for Terraform modules.
- Design ephemeral test environments that provision, validate and tear down platform stacks on every change.
Continuous verification and automation
- Build shift-left quality into CI/CD: automated gates for security, compliance, cost and drift before merge and release.
- Establish contract and compatibility testing so module and API changes never break consuming business teams.
- Lead resilience and chaos testing for platforms.
- Drive performance and scale testing for self-service provisioning paths.
GxP and computerised system assurance
- Modernise qualification from document-heavy validation to risk-based, automated Assurance.
- Generate qualification evidence (IQ/OQ traceability, test results, approvals) directly from pipelines.
- Partner with Quality, GRC and the CISO office to keep evidence audit-ready for GxP, SOX and data integrity requirements.
Images, supply chain and security quality
- Own test frameworks for VM, OS, database and container image bakeries: CIS benchmarks, vulnerability thresholds, SBOM and signing checks.
- Integrate CNAPP and code scanning findings (e.g. Wiz, GitHub Advanced Security) into release gates with clear SLAs.
AI and agentic platform quality
- Define evaluation frameworks for platform AI agents: accuracy, safety & guardrail
- Test agent-generated artifacts for correctness, policy compliance and blast radius before execution.
Engineering leadership
- Set quality metrics and SLOs, report them to platform and security leadership, and drive corrective actions.
- Mentor engineers across platform teams; grow a quality-engineering community of practice.
- Evaluate and select tooling; make build-vs-buy recommendations.
Required experience and skills
- 15+ years in software or platform engineering, with 3+ years leading quality or test engineering for tenant platforms at enterprise scale.
- Deep hands-on Terraform experience
- Strong policy-as-code skills around OPA/Rego
- Production experience on Azure and GCP; working knowledge of Kubernetes and GitOps
- Built CI/CD quality gates in GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or similar.
- Proficient in at least one of Python, Go or TypeScript for test frameworks and tooling.
- Experience in a regulated industry (life sciences, pharma, finance or healthcare), including GxP or equivalent validation.
- Track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience testing LLM-based or agentic systems
- Familiarity with software supply chain standards: SLSA, SBOM (SPDX/CycloneDX), Sigstore/cosign.
- Chaos engineering tools such as Azure Chaos Studio, LitmusChaos or Gremlin.
- Experience with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Azure Arc or hybrid estates.
- Certifications such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect, ISTQB Advanced or CKA.
Leadership behaviors and ways of working
- Quality as an engineering discipline: builds automation and paved roads, not manual sign-off queues.
- Risk-based judgement: scales testing rigour to patient, product and data-integrity impact.
- Influence without authority: aligns platform, security, Quality and GRC stakeholders on shared standards.
- Hands-on credibility: writes and reviews code, and can debug a failing pipeline alongside the team.
- Clear communicator: turns quality data into decisions for senior leadership and auditors alike.
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Skills
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 IN.recruitment-adjustments@gsk.com to discuss your needs.
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