Principal - Platform Engineer Segmentation

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 Engineer builds and runs GSK's network segmentation and identity-based access platform as automated, secure, self-service infrastructure. 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 automating away toil.

This is the senior hands-on engineering role in the platform team, working across network segmentation and identity-based access to integrate and assure delivery 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

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 automating to reduce toil, working with the Site Reliability Engineer on standards.

Adopt 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.

Work with principal engineers and partner engineers, linking engineering work to platform OKRs and outcomes.

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.

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.

Experience Required

Overall 10 years and typically 5-7 years in platform, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team.

Deep hands-on depth in the relevant platform domain, whether cloud and hosting, network or digital workplace.

Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept.

Experience with CI/CD pipelines, and with containers and Kubernetes where relevant to the platform.

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.

Strong experience engineering enterprise network security, segmentation or identity based access.

Deep knowledge of 802.1X authentication, network access control, firewalls, routing and resilient service design.

Evidence of implementing segmentation that improved security coverage, access control or operational resilience.

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

Automation Technology, CI/CD, Cloud Based Services, Cloud Networking, Computer Programming, Configuration Management (CM), Infrastructure As Code (IaC), IP Address Management (IPAM), Load Balancers, Microsegmentation, Network Design, Network Segmentation, Operational Technology (OT), Packet Switching, Security Engineering, Software-Defined Networking Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), SRE Observability, System Monitors, Terraform (Software), Wirel