Senior Principal Forward Deployed DevSecOps Engineer

Overview

Hands-on senior engineering role in GSK Labs & CMC Digital & Tech, working directly with Product Owners, scientists and data engineering teams to shape and deliver digital products for the lab, from discovery through production.

What you'll do

• Work with Product Owners, scientists and data engineering teams to understand lab workflows, data, constraints and desired outcomes.
• Pair with Product Owners to shape the problem and solution, challenge requirements where needed, and recommend the technical approach.
• Design and build PoCs, PoVs and MVPs in short cycles using real lab data and systems, with regular scientist feedback.
• Estimate benefit in time saved, errors avoided and manual effort removed, and recommend whether to continue, change direction or stop.
• Write, test and ship code, and own the technical design of the products you work on.
• Lead the move from MVP to production, covering architecture, integration, testing, security, deployment, monitoring, documentation and support handover.
• Set up and maintain a streamlined SDLC with CI/CD pipelines enabling frequent, safe releases.
• Build automated unit, integration, end-to-end and performance testing into every pipeline.
• Build security in from the start through secure coding, dependency and container scanning, static and dynamic analysis, and secrets management.
• Ensure solutions meet privacy, data integrity, and GxP and computer system validation requirements where they apply.
• Design observability in from day one using tools such as Grafana, Prometheus and Elastic.
• Integrate products with ServiceNow for incident, change and service management.
• Track delivery measures such as deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore.
• Work with the GSK central Digital Platforms team to obtain cloud infrastructure (for example Azure or GCP), and provision infrastructure using infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform.
• Package and deploy applications using Kubernetes and Helm, and manage environments through the pipeline.
• Build and extend the lab orchestration platform linking lab, data and generative design systems.
• Design lab automation connecting instruments, lab execution and data capture, moving towards closed-loop experiments.
• Build AI agents and agentic workflows that take on manual, repetitive tasks such as gathering data, checking results and preparing documents.
• Work with data engineering teams to bring lab, analytical, CMC and inventory data into structured data products.
• Use GenAI and machine learning to support experiment planning, next-step decisions and scientific knowledge retrieval.
• Use approved AI coding assistants and agent-based workflows, and build reusable harnesses such as skills, project context, tool and MCP connections, and test and review loops.
• Design agent-based systems, retrieval-augmented generation, MCP integrations and evaluation frameworks, with human review, guardrails and monitoring.
• Raise Responsible AI, data integrity and validation questions at prototype stage and work with Quality, Cyber and Risk colleagues to resolve them.
• Contribute agents, orchestration templates, integration patterns and reference designs to the Labs & CMC pattern library.
• Mentor and coach other engineers alongside delivery work, and use learnings to inform roadmaps, PI Planning and portfolio priorities.

What you'll need

• At least 8 years of full-stack, software, data or AI/ML engineering experience, including production systems where you were technical lead or owner.
• A track record of designing and building working software quickly and taking it into production.
• Strong Python skills and at least one of TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, Java or similar, with solid API, integration and cloud engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with GenAI, including agents, agentic and multi-agent workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering and evaluation.
• Experience with workflow orchestration and automation tools (for example n8n, Airflow or Temporal).
• Experience working alongside data engineering teams on data pipelines and data products.
• Strong DevSecOps experience, including building CI/CD pipelines (for example GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or Jenkins), automated unit, integration and performance testing, and security scanning in the pipeline.
• Solid cloud infrastructure experience on at least one major cloud platform (for example Azure, GCP or AWS), including networking, identity and security.
• Experience provisioning infrastructure using infrastructure as code (for example Terraform) and deploying with container tools (for example Kubernetes or Helm).
• Experience working with central platform teams.
• Experience setting up observability with tools such as Grafana, Prometheus and Elastic, and working with ServiceNow for incident and change management.
• Regular use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or GitHub Copilot in day-to-day development.
• Experience working directly with Product Owners and business users to shape requirements and drive a solution, and explaining options and risks clearly to senior stakeholders.
• Experience working with teams across different locations and time zones.
• Experience in a regulated environment, with a practical understanding of security, privacy, quality and compliance.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Engineering or a related subject, or relevant industry experience.

Nice to have

• Experience in a startup, innovation team or forward deployed role.
• Experience in pharma, biotech or life sciences R&D.
• Experience with instrument integration, robotics, or automated and closed-loop experimentation.
• Knowledge of quality and regulatory requirements for software in a regulated industry, for example GxP, computer system validation and data integrity.
• Experience working in a hybrid cloud environment.
• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Customer Engineer or Solutions Architect.
• Experience sharing reusable engineering patterns with a wider team and mentoring other engineers.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru Luxor North Tower.