Senior Principal - Agile CoE

GSK remains committed to achieving bold commercial ambitions for the future. By 2031, we aim to deliver £40 billion in annual sales, leveraging our existing strong performance momentum to significantly increase our positive impact on the health of billions of patients globally. Our Ahead Together strategy is centred on early intervention to prevent and alter the course of disease, thereby protecting people and supporting healthcare systems.

Our diverse portfolio consists of vaccines, specialty medicines, and general medicines.

Through continuous innovation and a dedicated focus on scientific and technical excellence, we strive to develop and launch new, groundbreaking treatments that address critical health challenges.

Job Purpose 

The Senior Principal, Agile CoE is the senior agile authority for DPTF. The role defines the agile and lean portfolio ways of working the function uses, leads adoption of scaled agile practice, coaches teams and leaders, and raises delivery maturity across the platform and product domains.

The role owns the delivery method. The governance and planning cadence that uses that method is run by the Director, Planning & Performance, and the two are designed to fit together. It provides professional leadership to the federated Principal Release Train Engineers in the domains, so practice is consistent across DPTF without being centrally run. The role's measure of success is embedding agile and lean delivery capability directly into the platform and product teams, so that strong delivery practice becomes self-sustaining across DPTF.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the agile and lean portfolio ways of working for DPTF, including the standards, delivery frameworks and practices teams are expected to apply.
• Lead adoption of scaled agile practice across the function, tailoring the framework to what DPTF actually needs instead of implementing it wholesale.
• Embed lean portfolio management, linking work to strategy, funding value streams and steering with OKRs and flow metrics.
• Set the delivery method that the governance and planning cadence relies on, working with the Director, Planning & Performance who runs that cadence.
• Coach Release Train Engineers, Scrum Masters, delivery teams and leaders to raise delivery maturity across the function.
• Provide professional leadership to the federated Principal Release Train Engineers in the platform domains, so agile practice is consistent without being centrally run.
• Support delivery orchestration and dependency management at scale, including cross domain planning events.
• Measure agile maturity and delivery flow across DPTF as instruments of the method, targeting coaching where the evidence shows practice is weakest, with the delivery and service metrics leadership is held to owned by the Technology Performance Manager.
• Promote AI assisted delivery practices, helping teams use AI to accelerate flow and quality and to reduce the administrative load of running agile.
• Connect portfolio, demand, operations and delivery processes so that work flows between them without manual reconciliation.
• Run the agile community of practice for DPTF, building capability and spreading what works between domains.
• Support the transition from project based delivery to product and value stream based delivery, including how funding and governance change with it.

Experience Required

• Overall 15+ Years of experience, typically 8-10 years in agile delivery, agile coaching or delivery transformation roles, including work at scale across multiple teams.
• Proven experience defining agile ways of working and standards for a large organisation.
• Experience leading adoption of a scaled agile framework and tailoring it to a specific organisational context.
• Experience embedding lean portfolio management, including value stream funding and flow metrics.
• Experience coaching Release Train Engineers, Scrum Masters and senior leaders.
• Experience measuring delivery maturity and targeting improvement from evidence.
• Experience supporting a move from project based to product based delivery.
• Familiarity with AI assisted delivery practices and the tooling that supports them.

Skills/Background

• Deep practical knowledge of agile and lean portfolio practice, with the judgement to know when to apply it lightly.
• Excellent coaching and facilitation skills at every level from team to executive.
• Ability to set standards that teams adopt willingly, influencing without direct authority.
• Strong analytical skills, able to read flow and maturity data and act on what it shows.
• Ability to build and sustain a professional community across multiple locations.
• Pragmatism, able to improve delivery practice without imposing process for its own sake.

Skills

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.

Inclusion at GSK:

As an employer committed to Inclusion, we encourage you to reach out if you need any adjustments during the recruitment process.

Please contact our Recruitment Team at IN.recruitment-adjustments@gsk.com to discuss your needs.

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