Senior Principal Platform Engineer – DevSecOps / DevEx

Overview

Senior technical owner of GSK's Modern Engineering platforms (Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, GitHub Enterprise, Azure DevOps, observability and the Nuro AIOps control plane), running them as secure, self-service products across Azure and GCP in a GxP-regulated environment.

What you'll do

• Run each platform as a product with SLOs, a capacity plan and a lifecycle (patching, upgrades, end-of-life).
• Feed engineering-led items, including technical debt and upgrades, into the Product Owner's backlog, with the cost of not doing them stated.
• Achieve 99.9% availability for tier-1 platforms.
• Lead technical incident response with Reliability Engineering, run blameless post-incident reviews and drive permanent automated fixes.
• Close observability gaps so reliability is measured, not inferred.
• Manage platform config, policies, pipelines and dashboards in Git through Terraform, Ansible, Helm and GitOps.
• Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing, and review AI-generated output before it is merged.
• Enforce SSO, least-privilege RBAC, secrets management, signed artefacts, branch protection and supply-chain controls (SLSA, SBOM, GitHub Advanced Security) inside the golden path.
• Build reusable templates, pipelines and automation content for GitHub, ADO, AAP, Azure and GCP so delivery teams self-serve.
• Design and code agentic AI agents for self-healing and autonomous operations, with human approval gates, guardrails and audit trails.
• Keep platforms in a validated state for GxP, SOX and data-privacy controls, and produce audit evidence automatically from the pipeline.
• Act as technical lead for the platforms strategy, including migration plans, licence optimisation and FinOps for runners and hosting.
• Measure and improve DORA metrics and platform NPS; work the toil backlog and evidence the effort removed; run onboarding, documentation and office hours.
• Set and uphold engineering standards in design and code review, applying the Platform Architect's reference architectures.
• Mentor internal and partner engineers, hold supplier-delivered work to the same standard, and manage technical relationships with Red Hat, GitHub, Microsoft and Google.

What you'll need

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics).
• Overall, 15 years of experience and typically 6-8 years in platform, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team.
• Proven experience as a DevOps or Cloud Engineer with design experience.
• Proficient in building solutions using container services, AKS and GKE.
• Hands-on experience deploying container solutions, including Docker containers, and managing K8s deployments using YAML and Helm charts.
• Experience creating agentic AI agents for self-healing and autonomous operations.
• Familiarity with service discovery tools such as Istio and Mesh.
• Expert in using GitHub, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps and other configuration tools.
• Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept.
• 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.

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).
• Certifications in cloud platforms (e.g. Google Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert).
• Familiarity with multi-cloud deployments using cloud tools such as Camunda, GitHub Actions, Azure Arc, Google Anthos.
• Understanding of AKS and GKE security practices.
• Knowledge of pharma practices, GxP, validation, audit readiness and how to optimise delivery to accommodate these practices.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India (Luxor North Tower).