Staff Engineering & Team Lead

Site Name: London The Stanley Building

Posted Date: Jan 6 2026

Staff Engineering & Team Lead Business Introduction

The Onyx Research Data Platform organization represents a major investment by GSK R&D and Digital & Tech, designed to deliver a step change in our ability to leverage data, knowledge, and prediction to find new medicines. We are a full stack shop consisting of product and portfolio leadership, data engineering, infrastructure and DevOps, data / metadata / knowledge platforms, and AI/ML and analysis platforms, all geared toward:

• Building a unified, automated, next-generation data experience for GSK's scientists, engineers, and decision makers, increasing productivity, and reducing data friction
• Providing best in class AI/ML, GenAI and data analysis environments to accelerate our predictive capabilities and attract top tier talent
• Aggressively engineering our data at scale to unlock the value of our combined data assets and predictions in real time

Data Engineering is responsible for the design, delivery, support and maintenance of industrialised automated end to end data services and pipelines. They apply standardised data models and mapping to ensure data is accessible for end users in end to end user tools through use of APIs. They define and embed best practices and ensure compliance with Quality Management practices and alignment to automated data governance. They also acquire and process internal and external, structured and unstructured data in line with Product requirements.

Position Summary

As a Staff Data Engineer, you are responsible for building and leading a scrum team of world class data engineers focused on building automated, scalable and sustainable pipelines to account for evolving scientific needs. You deeply influence the engineering direction of the Onyx platform, ensuring we build the best in class capabilities across data ingestion, streaming, transformation, knowledge graphs, metadata, vectorised data pipelines and AI/GenAI integration. You support the head of Data Engineering in building a strong culture of accountability and ownership in the team, as well as instilling robust engineering practices (e.g. testing, code reviews, DevOps forward ways of working). You work in close partnership with our Platforms teams to ensure we have the right tools and ways of working, and with our Bioinformatics teams to ensure the use of appropriate schemas, vocabularies and ontologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers in delivering data and knowledge products that advance GSK R&D
• Architect end to end data pipeline patterns, abstractions, and reusable frameworks that improve reliability, observability and developer experience and define standards for data modelling, lineage, metadata, vectorisation and governance
• Partner closely with other data engineering leads to conceptualise the design of new data flows aimed at maximising reuse and aligning with an event driven micro service enable architecture
• Collaborate with ML and GenAI teams to optimise data flows for fine tuning, prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and champion data best practices for GenAI workloads
• Design an innovative strategy beyond the current enterprise way of working to create a better environment for the end users, and capable of constructing a coordinated, stepwise plan to bring others along with the change curve
• Serve as the standard bearer for proper ways of working and engineering discipline, including the QMS framework and CI/CD best practices and proactively spearhead improvement within their engineering area
• Act as an exemplar leader in their field of technical knowledge, keen on bettering their understanding and acting as the knowledge holder for the organisation

Why You? Basic Qualification

• Bachelor's degree in Data Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering or related discipline
• Strong data engineering experience in industry
• Experience with agile software development environments using tools such as Jira and Confluence
• Demonstrable experience overcoming high volume, high compute challenges
• Familiarity with orchestrating tooling
• Cloud experience (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Kubernetes)
• Experience in automated testing and design
• Experience with DevOps forward ways of working
• Deep knowledge and use of at least one common programming language: e.g. Python, Scala, Java
• Deep experience with common big data tools (e.g. Spark, Kafka, Storm and others)
• Application experience of CI/CD implementations using Git and a common CI/CD stack (e.g. Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab, Azure DevOps)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation tools (e.g. Terraform)
• Expertise in data modelling, database concepts and SQL

Preferred Qualification

• Master's or PhD in Data Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering or related discipline
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, LLM data pipelines and RAG architecture

Location and Working Pattern

This role is based in the United Kingdom and operates in a hybrid working model. You will combine time in the office and remote work to balance collaboration and focus.

How to Apply

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and life experiences who share our commitment to improving health. If this role matches your skills and ambitions, please apply. Include a CV and a brief note about why this role matters to you and how you would contribute to the team. We encourage candidates who are excited by growth, real impact and working with talented, caring colleagues to apply today.

Closing Date: 24th January 2026

Why GSK?

Uniting science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together.

GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of the decade, as a successful, growing company where people can thrive. We get ahead of disease by preventing and treating it with innovation in specialty medicines and vaccines. We focus on four therapeutic areas: respiratory, immunology and inflammation; oncology; HIV; and infectious diseases - to impact health at scale.

People and patients around the world count on the medicines and vaccines we make, so we're committed to creating an environment where our people can thrive and focus on what matters most. Our culture of being ambitious for patients, accountable for impact and doing the right thing is the foundation for how, together, we deliver for patients, shareholders and our people.

GSK is an Equal Opportunity Employer. This ensures that all qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity and sexual orientation), parental status, national origin, age, disability, genetic information (including family medical history), military service or any basis prohibited under federal, state and local law.

We believe in an agile working culture for all our roles. If flexibility is important to you, we encourage you to explore with our hiring team what the opportunities are.

Should you require any adjustments to our process to assist you in demonstrating your strengths and capabilities contact us at where you can also request a call.

Please note that if your enquiry does not relate to adjustments, we will not be able to support you through this channel. However, we have created a Recruitment FAQ guide. Link to the guide.

Important notice to Employment businesses/ Agencies: GSK does not accept referrals from employment businesses and agencies in respect of the vacancies posted on this site. All employment businesses/agencies are required to contact GSK's commercial and general procurement/human resources department to obtain prior written authorization before referring any candidates to GSK. The obtaining of prior written authorization is a condition precedent to any agreement (verbal or written) between the employment business/agency and GSK. In the absence of such written authorization being obtained any actions undertaken by the employment business/agency shall be deemed to have been performed without the consent or contractual agreement of GSK. GSK shall therefore not be liable for any fees arising from such actions or any fees arising from any referrals by employment businesses/agencies in respect of the vacancies posted on this site.

For US Licensed Healthcare Professionals or Healthcare Professionals as defined by the laws of the state issuing your license, GSK may be required to capture and report expenses GSK incurs, on your behalf, in the event you are afforded an interview for employment. This capture of applicable transfers of value is necessary to ensure GSK's compliance to all federal and state US Transparency requirements. For more information, please visit the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website at