Principal Data Engineer

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

GSK R&D is led by science. Science is driving an ever-increasing variance and complexity of Drug Safety, and its related data collection and management. This presents great opportunity for Tech enablement via investments in modern platform technologies and Digital applications, across GSKs Pharma and Vaccines organizations.

In this role you will

• Technical Leadership & Architecture: Design and implement end-to-end, AI-driven data pipelines that ingest, transform, and analyze safety data from multiple sources. Lead to build enterprise data platforms with modern AI-Native solutions by leveraging technologies such as RAG, Vector Databases, Agentic AI, LLMOps, LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Search, AI Agents, and Azure OpenAI to deliver intelligent, autonomous, and AI-driven business capabilities.
• Automation & Process Optimization: Build scalable solutions that replace labor-intensive tasks with automated workflows, significantly reducing processing time and errors. Collaborate with the Product Owner and cross-functional teams to ensure technical solutions align with the strategic product roadmap.
• Product/Project Delivery: Deliver the optimal set of products and services which meets the business strategy and requirements. Execution of the product roadmap. The ability to think big picture and customer first is imperative.
• Data Analysis & Enhancement: Develop novel approaches to extract actionable insights from complex data sets. Utilize advanced analytics techniques to continuously optimize data quality, drive signal detection, and support regulatory reporting.
• Operational Excellence: Ensure solutions adhere to best practices in software development, including robust testing, code documentation, and DevOps practices. Monitor system performance, proactively identify areas for improvement, and implement optimizations to maintain high system reliability.
• Quality, Risk & Compliance: Responsible for ensuring all products supporting the business are compliant with internal security, risk management policies and practices, external regulatory and statutory requirements e.g. GxP, and that Tech continuity plans are in place for all business-critical products.
• Feature Definition: Proven ability to translate customer requests, competitive activities, and industry trends into value drivers of new technology solutions and product requirements that can be easily understood by product teams, developers and other key constituencies within the organization.
• Service Management: Consult on complex Level 3 support issues and escalations.
• Team Collaboration: Work in collaboration with the broader team to drive and deliver business value to tight timelines adhering to the release management calendar where applicable. Work closely with data engineers, scientists, and business stakeholders to troubleshoot issues, gather requirements, and drive technical innovations.
• Adoption strategy & change management: In the role of change agent, support both the product teams and the business in agile approaches to solution development and adoption, building excitement, momentum, visible success stories and clear value-based versions of vision as roadmap plans come to life.

Qualifications & Skills:

• Minimum 10 years of hands-on technical experience in data engineering, AI/ML, and automation projects within regulated industries
• Strong proficiency in programming languages such as Python (PySpark and Fastapi is a plus)

• Possess hands-on experience in the following AI-Native technologies: Designing and implementing RAG architectures, Context enrichment strategies for LLM applications, Vector Databases such as Azure AI Search Vector Capabilities, Multi-agent orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph and Semantic Kernel; Knowledge graph integration.

• Experience with cloud-based data platforms like Snowflake and Azure - development, integration, and configuration (Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure App Services, Azure Cognitive Services, ADLSv2, Azure Key Vault and more)
• Experience with implementation of DevOps best practices (version control, CI/CD, Azure DevOps, YAML pipelines)
• Experience with data analytics platforms, data visualization or Business Intelligence tools (preferably Power BI)
• Experience with data virtualization (Denodo)
• Excellent problem-solving skills, a proactive mindset, and the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and business teams
• Strong communication, and interpersonal skills, ability to influence sr. leadership and decision-making using data, market evidence
• Good track record in delivering business impact through process and IT enabled solutions, across multiple business lines

Preferred Qualifications & Skills:

• Handson experience with AI-Native tool and technologies
• Understanding of data mesh / fabric principles
• Understanding Datawarehouse design and ELT processes
• Experience in designing scalable architectures and automating business processes using AI
• Knowledge of cloud & webservice platforms such as Azure Databricks, RESTful Webservices
• Relentless for delivering business outcomes and value and simplification with a passion for science and advancing medicines to patients
  

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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We are a global biopharma company with a special purpose – to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together – so we can positively impact the health of billions of people and deliver stronger, more sustainable shareholder returns – as an organisation where people can thrive. Getting ahead means preventing disease as well as treating it, and we aim to impact the health of 2.5 billion people around the world in the next 10 years.

Our success absolutely depends on our people. While getting ahead of disease together is about our ambition for patients and shareholders, it’s also about making GSK a place where people can thrive. We want GSK to be a place where people feel inspired, encouraged and challenged to be the best they can be. A place where they can be themselves – feeling welcome, valued and included. Where they can keep growing and look after their wellbeing. So, if you share our ambition, join us at this exciting moment in our journey to get Ahead Together. Find out more on our career site.