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 an 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, structure 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, vectorized 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). They 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.

This role is for an engineer who combines hands-on expertise with strategic vision, operating both as a senior builder and a technical thought leader.
Key Responsibilities:
This role will provide YOU the opportunity to lead key activities to progress YOUR career. These responsibilities include some of the following:

• 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, vectorization and governance

• Partners closely with other data engineering leads to conceptualise the design of new data flows aimed at maximising reuse and aligning with an event-driven microservice enable architecture

• Collaborate with ML and GenAI teams to optimize data flows for fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and champion data best practices for GenAI workloads

• Designs an innovative strategy beyond the current enterprise way of working to create a better environment for the end users, and able to construct a coordinated, stepwise plan to bring others along with the change curve

• 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

• Exemplar leaders in their field of technical knowledge, keen on bettering their understanding and acting as the knowledge holder for the organisation 

Basic Qualification
We are seeking professionals with the following required skills and qualifications to help us achieve our goals

• Bachelors’ degree, Data Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline

• Strong data engineering experience in industry

• Experience with agile software development environments using tools like Jira and Confluence 

• Demonstratable 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, …)

• 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 a Code and automation tools (i.e. Terraform)

• Expertise in data modelling, database concepts and SQL

Preferred Qualification
If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus

• Masters 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.

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

#R&DTechProject

#Hybrid

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 or 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 [email protected] where you can also request a call.

Please note should your enquiry not relate to adjustments, we will not be able to support you through these channels. However, we have created a  Recruitment FAQ guide. Click the link where you will find answers to multiple questions we receive

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