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

Are you a recognized leader in modern software engineering, with the technical depth and the credibility to change how a large engineering organization builds software? Do you want to lead the move to autonomous, AI-driven development at GSK, and prove its value with evidence? Do you want to apply this to Clinical Trials technology, to deliver faster, reduce risk and optimize cost and timelines? We'd like to hear from you if you think you might make a good fit! Job Purpose This is a senior leadership and technical authority role for the evolution of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) across DevCMO Tech engineering. You will set the direction for, and lead the adoption of, autonomous development tools such as Cursor Cloud Agents and Cognition, or comparable platforms, so that engineering teams can make their development process progressively more autonomous. This supports strategic programs to improve patient enrolment in clinical trials and accelerate regulatory submissions using AI and modern tooling You will do this by working inside engineering teams and across organizational boundaries. You will be hands-on with the tools and the Azure and GCP infrastructure behind them, and you will gather the evidence that shows what they deliver. You will lead a small team and work closely with other architects, engineers, product teams, R&D Tech central services, and Security, Quality and Regulatory partners. Key Responsibilities: Technical direction and tooling 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 collaboration and delivery tooling, including 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 that supports 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. Embedding, influence and adoption Embed with engineering teams for periods of time to understand how they work, 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.