Senior Principal Cloud Foundations Engineer – Automation

Overview

Senior Principal Cloud Foundations Engineer – Automation builds and runs GSK's Internal Hosting Portal, focusing on its server side and workflow automation so application teams can provision and manage cloud resources self-service.

What you'll do

• Design, build and automate provisioning of foundational infrastructure resources through the portal's services, integrations and workflows, using infrastructure-as-code and golden paths.
• Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing, reviewing AI-generated output before it is merged.
• Build self-service capabilities and paved roads that reduce friction for consuming teams.
• Engineer for reliability by defining SLOs, instrumenting services and workflows for observability, and automating to reduce toil, working with the Site Reliability Engineer on standards.
• Set and uphold engineering standards, secure-by-default practices and code quality, and hold them in code review.
• Contribute to incident response and drive permanent automated fixes with Reliability Engineering.
• Mentor and technically lead other engineers, including partner engineers, linking engineering work to platform OKRs and outcomes.
• Integrate and assure supplier or managed-service components, holding partner-delivered engineering to the same standards as internal work.
• Work the platform's manual task and toil backlog, converting candidates into automation and evidencing the effort removed.
• Close observability coverage gaps so reliability can be measured rather than inferred.
• Contribute engineering-led backlog items, including technical debt and upgrade and automation work, stating the cost of not doing them.
• Apply reference architectures and patterns set by the Platform Architect, and raise a case for change rather than diverging locally.

What you'll need

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics), or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 8-10 years in cloud, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team.
• Excellent knowledge and hands-on experience with TypeScript (ES6+) and Node.js server-side development.
• Developed REST and GraphQL APIs based on Node.js (Express).
• Integrating with cloud provider and third-party APIs, with retries, idempotency and error handling for long-running operations.
• Designing and automating long-running, multi-step processes (retries, timeouts, compensation, human approval steps) using a workflow orchestration or durable-execution approach.
• Working knowledge of landing zones and serverless technologies across Azure and GCP.
• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates.
• Building and deploying through CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) with Docker, and operating services on Microsoft Azure (App Service, Application Insights).
• 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.
• Good knowledge and hands-on experience with HTML5 and CSS3 (including preprocessors).
• Good knowledge and hands-on experience with React, NextJS, GraphQL, Yoga, Prisma ORM, and Apollo Client.
• Previous experience developing React UIs with Mantine, Material UI, or Chakra UI.
• Familiarity with popular patterns and libraries such as React Hooks, and server-state management (Apollo Client, TanStack Query).
• Previously developed schema-based forms using a library such as react-hook-form or Formik, including validator libraries such as Yup, Zod or JOI.
• Knowledge of modern authentication and authorization mechanisms such as OAuth v2 or SAML and JSON Web Token, and libraries such as MSAL.
• Strong experience with test automation (unit and integration) tools such as Jest and Cypress.

Nice to have

• Relevant technical certifications (e.g., a recognised cloud certification for AWS, GCP or Azure, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or a network vendor certification relevant to the platform).
• Previously worked in a central IT team within a regulated environment such as Pharmaceutical or Finance, including knowledge of GxP, validation and audit readiness.
• Workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, Camunda, Azure Durable Functions or AWS Step Functions.
• Experience with internal developer platforms, self-service portals or golden-path catalogues (e.g., Backstage).
• Building LLM-powered features (tool use / MCP).
• Scripting in Python and PowerShell.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, Luxor North Tower.