Director - Solution Architect

Overview

The Solution Architect provides solution architecture and design assurance for major GSK initiatives, ensuring solutions meet architecture standards, fit the target architecture and deliver the intended business outcomes.

What you'll do

• Produce solution designs for major DPTF and broader Digital & Tech initiatives, aligned to reference architectures, enterprise standards and strategy.
• Build reliability, resilience and observability into designs from the outset, aware of the SLOs the consuming services commit to.
• Design AI-enabled solutions where AI genuinely accelerates delivery or operations and state the case rather than including it by default.
• Provide design assurance and architecture review for initiatives led by others, declining designs that do not meet the standard and saying what would.
• Balance business outcome, cost, risk and technical fit in every design.
• Work across platform domains so that end-to-end solutions are coherent, surfacing conflicts between domain architectures early.
• Assure the architecture of supplier and managed-service solutions to the same standard as internal designs.
• Uphold architecture standards and governance, routing genuine exceptions through Enterprise Architecture rather than allowing local workarounds.
• Ensure designs meet security and compliance requirements, including GxP where the initiative supports regulated activity.
• Reduce rework by engaging early in initiative shaping rather than reviewing completed designs and evidence the reduction.
• Advise on architectural risk and the consequence of the technical debt they are accepting.
• Hold the boundaries with the Platform Architects on platform-level reference architecture, the Enterprise Architects on enterprise strategy and standards, and the engineering teams on build.

What you'll need

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems).
• 18+ years in technology architecture or senior engineering, including at least three years producing solution designs for major initiatives.
• Breadth across more than one technology domain, sufficient to design and assure end to end rather than within a specialism.
• Experience working with and influencing one or more business domain architects (e.g. R&D, Commercial, Global Functions, or Global Supply Chain).
• Experience running architecture review or design assurance, including declining a design and specifying what would pass.
• Track record designing for reliability, resilience and observability rather than adding them afterwards.
• Experience designing secure and compliant solutions.
• Experience assuring supplier or systems integrator designs to an internal standard.
• Practical awareness of AI patterns and judgment for where AI adds genuine value.
• Hands-on experience designing across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS on Azure and/or GCP.
• A firm understanding of Modern Engineering workflows, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability, and how AI-assisted and agentic tooling fits into them.

Nice to have

• Architecture certifications (recognised cloud, network or workplace architecture certification).
• Familiarity with GxP validation requirements for solution designs, beyond platform standards.
• Experience producing designs later delivered through third-party systems integrators.
• Exposure to FinOps or cost-to-operate considerations in solution design decisions.
• Hands-on experience with AI-enabled patterns (RAG, agentic workflows) as delivery accelerants.
• Breadth over depth, with the confidence to reason about domains where others are the specialists.
• Ability to decline a design and leave the relationship intact by saying clearly what would pass.
• Clear design documentation and diagramming for mixed technical and business audiences.
• Judgement about when an exception is genuinely warranted and when it is convenience.
• Comfort engaging early in initiative shaping where requirements are still ambiguous.
• Pragmatism about technical debt, making the cost visible rather than blocking delivery.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India.