Senior Director, Distinguished Engineer – SDLC and Autonomous Development, DevCMO Tech

Overview

Senior leadership and technical authority role to set direction for and lead adoption of autonomous, AI-driven development tools (such as Cursor Cloud Agents and Cognition, or comparable platforms) across DevCMO Tech engineering, supporting clinical trial and regulatory programs.

What you'll do

• Set the technical strategy for autonomous development across DevCMO Tech, and evaluate tools such as Cursor Cloud Agents, Cognition or similar through hands-on proofs of concept.
• Recommend what to adopt based on value, security, compliance and cost.
• Lead the implementation of approved tools, including environments, access and permissions, guardrails, and cost and usage monitoring.
• Integrate autonomous agents into Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps (work items, repos, pull requests, pipelines and approvals) so agents can take work from backlog to reviewed code with appropriate human oversight.
• Architect and oversee the Azure and GCP cloud infrastructure supporting these tools, including identity, networking, secrets management, sandboxed execution environments and observability.
• Keep autonomous development practices compliant with GSK Security, Quality and Regulatory (GxP) standards, including audit trails, traceability and validation expectations.
• Embed with engineering teams for periods of time to introduce the tools and practices, and coach them through the change.
• Work across organizational boundaries (engineering groups, product teams, central services, Security, Quality, Regulatory and partners) to build alignment and get buy-in for process change.
• Define and share best practices, reference architectures, patterns and playbooks (e.g. task specification, agent guardrails, review of agent-generated changes and testing expectations).
• Build communities of practice, run demos and workshops, and present clearly to engineers and senior executives.
• Establish baselines before adoption, then measure and report productivity gains across delivery flow (including DORA metrics), quality and rework, developer experience and adoption, and cost and business outcomes.
• Communicate results honestly, including where tools do not deliver, and adjust the approach based on the evidence.
• Lead and develop a small team of engineers and architects, and provide technical direction to teams made up of GSK FTEs, strategic partners and software vendors.
• Keep up with a fast-moving market, run experiments, and keep technical documentation and decisions up to date to support audits and reviews.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline.
• Experience in modern software engineering and developer productivity, with a track record of leading enterprise-wide change in engineering practices.
• Experience with autonomous or agentic coding tools, such as Cursor (including Cloud Agents), Cognition or similar platforms.
• Experience with Azure DevOps (repos, boards, pipelines) and integrating it with other tools through APIs and automation.
• Experience integrating engineering workflows with Microsoft Teams (e.g. bots, notifications, approvals and workflow automation).
• Experience designing and operating solutions on both Azure and GCP cloud infrastructure.
• Experience in DevOps and automation: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerisation (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes) and Git-based workflows.
• Exceptional communication, negotiation and influencing skills, with evidence of gaining buy-in for change across teams and organizational boundaries, including by embedding in teams.
• Experience leading and developing teams, and technical leadership of teams that include partners and vendors.
• Experience in security and identity practices for cloud and AI tooling (e.g. OAuth, secrets management, least privilege and access controls).

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated environments, with awareness of GxP, audit review and validation requirements and Privileged Access Management.
• Experience with AI/ML and LLM-based tooling, such as prompt and context engineering, MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent evaluation.
• Experience defining governance and guardrails for AI-assisted development, such as quality gates and cost controls.
• Familiarity with R&D, clinical development or pharmaceutical technology, including clinical trial systems and regulatory submissions.
• A public profile in the engineering community, such as conference talks, publications or open source contributions.
• Experience delivering and integrating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and working with software vendors and strategic partners.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru Luxor North Tower.