Director, Solution Architect

At GSK, we unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We are a global biopharma company with a special purpose - to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We're proud to be leading a healthcare revolution, and we're looking for people who can help us deliver on our ambition.

The Solution Architect provides solution architecture and design assurance for major GSK initiatives, ensuring solutions meet architecture standards, fit the target architecture and deliver the intended business outcomes. The role produces solution designs, builds reliability, resilience and observability in from the start, designs AI-enabled solutions where they accelerate delivery or operations, and works across domains so that end-to-end solutions are coherent rather than locally optimal.

Platform-level reference architectures and standards sit with the Platform Architects and Platform Architecture Directors in each business domain, engineering delivery sits with the platform engineering teams, and enterprise architecture strategy and the architecture team sit with the Head of Solution Architecture and the Enterprise Architects. Where a design touches platforms, the business-facing domain architect leads and the Solution Architect provides assurance that the overall solution remains aligned with the relevant platform standards, target architecture and end-to-end design.

Key Responsibilities

• Produce solution designs for major DPTF and broader Digital &Tech initiatives, aligned to reference architectures, enterprise standards and strategy.
• Build reliability, resilience and observability into designs from the outset, aware of the SLOs the consuming services commit to.
• Design AI-enabled solutions where AI genuinely accelerates delivery or operations and state the case rather than including it by default.
• Provide design assurance and architecture review for initiatives led by others, declining designs that do not meet the standard and saying what would.
• Balance business outcome, cost, risk and technical fit in every design
• Work across platform domains so that end-to-end solutions are coherent, surfacing conflicts between domain architectures early.
• Assure the architecture of supplier and managed-service solutions to the same standard as internal designs.
• Uphold architecture standards and governance, routing genuine exceptions through Enterprise Architecture rather than allowing local workarounds.
• Ensure designs meet security and compliance requirements, including GxP where the initiative supports regulated activity.
• Reduce rework by engaging early in initiative shaping rather than reviewing completed designs and evidence the reduction.
• Advise on architectural risk and the consequence of the technical debt they are accepting.
• Hold the boundaries with the Platform Architects on platform-level reference architecture, the Enterprise Architects on enterprise strategy and standards, and the engineering teams on build.

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems).
• Demonstrated experience in technology architecture or senior engineering, including experience producing solution designs for major initiatives.
• Breadth across more than one technology domain, sufficient to design and assure end to end rather than within a specialism.
• Hands-on experience designing across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS on Azure and/or GCP.
• Experience working with and influencing one or more business domain architects (eg: R&D, Commercial, Global Functions, or Global Supply Chain)
• Experience running architecture review or design assurance, including declining a design and specifying what would pass.
• Track record designing for reliability, resilience and observability rather than adding them afterwards.
• Experience designing secure and compliant solutions
• Experience assuring supplier or systems integrator designs to an internal standard.
• Practical awareness of AI patterns and judgment for where AI adds genuine value
• A firm understanding of Modern Engineering workflows, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability, and how AI-assisted and agentic tooling fits into them.

• Architecture certifications desirable (recognised cloud, network or workplace architecture certification).
• Familiarity with GxP validation requirements for solution designs, beyond platform standards.
• Experience producing designs later delivered through third-party systems integrators.
• Exposure to FinOps or cost-to-operate considerations in solution design decisions.
• Hands-on experience with AI-enabled patterns (RAG, agentic workflows) as delivery accelerants.