Director, Enterprise Architect - Recovery and Resiliency

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 Enterprise Architect, Recovery and Resiliency owns the direction of GSK's resiliency, business continuity, and disaster recovery architecture across technology domains. The role is part of DPTF (Digital Platforms and Technology Foundations) and operates under architecture governance. The standards and guardrails from this role apply to all Digital and Tech.

The role sets the target state for enterprise resiliency, defining standards and reusable patterns for recovery, failover, and continuity of service across platforms and domains, so that no single domain's resiliency posture is left to chance or inconsistent design. It decides which recovery architectures, redundancy models, and continuity technologies GSK will adopt, keep, replace, or retire, and sets the recovery time and recovery point objectives that other domains must design to.

The role uses two inputs to set direction. The first input is what GSK business units need in terms of acceptable downtime, data loss tolerance, and continuity of critical services. The second input is the direction of the resiliency and recovery industry, including how threats, dependencies, and best practices are evolving. The role must know about emerging resiliency risks and recovery approaches before GSK needs them, and tests that GSK's architecture can actually withstand disruption rather than assuming it can. It keeps close contact with industry peers, technology providers, and the broader market on resiliency practice.

The role has deep knowledge of recovery and resiliency architecture, including how AI and AI agent-dependent systems introduce new failure modes and recovery considerations that must be designed for. It also has good knowledge of other technology and business domains in GSK, understanding where their dependencies create shared points of failure. The role also provides architectural input into the DPTF Strategic Funding Review, ensuring investment cases reflect the true cost of resiliency, where investment decisions rest with the Chief Technology Officer.

Key Responsibilities

• Confirm that Architecture Review Board trigger criteria are met, and route demand that can be resolved at Technical Design Authority or delivery level back to those forums rather than escalating it.

• Prepare and collate the documented architectural impacts, solution options, trade-offs and recommendations that the Architecture Review Board decides on.

• Review and approve architecture exceptions and new technology patterns that fall outside established enterprise standards, recording the reasoning so the precedent is usable.

• Contribute to defining, maintaining and evolving enterprise architecture principles, standards and guardrails, and the technology framework and business capability model, in line with business and technology strategy.

• Provide architectural guidance on key design decisions across DPTF, working with the Platform Architecture Directors and Solution Architects rather than duplicating their designs.

• Contribute to the Architecture Runway owned by the Director, EA Standards and Governance, including the approach to incubating and scaling emerging technology.

• Assess where AI capability belongs in the enterprise architecture and set the patterns and guardrails for its adoption rather than approving deployments case by case.

• Provide architectural input to the DPTF Strategic Funding Review, so investment cases carry an architectural view of cost, risk and fit before decisions are taken.
• Ensure enterprise architecture standards reflect security, resilience and GxP requirements, working with Information Security and Quality rather than restating their standards.

• Escalate architectural decisions that exceed Board authority to the DPTF SteerCo, and support the presentation of the case in that forum.

• Increase pattern reuse and standards adherence across DPTF, evidencing both through exception volume and repeat design issues rather than by assertion.

• Hold the boundaries with the Platform Architecture Directors on domain target architecture, the Solution Architects on initiative designs, and the Director, Tech Strategy Manager on technology strategy development.

Basic Qualifications

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems).
• Demonstrated experience in technology architecture, including experience at enterprise or cross-domain level rather than within a single platform.

• Experience defining or maintaining enterprise architecture principles, standards or a business capability model.

• Experience operating an architecture review or governance forum, including declining demand that belonged at a lower level.

• Track record approving or refusing architecture exceptions and being answerable for the precedent set.

• Breadth across several technology domains, sufficient to judge trade-offs outside a personal specialism.

• Experience in a regulated environment, ideally pharmaceutical or GxP, where architecture decisions carry compliance consequence.

• Practical view on where AI capability belongs in an enterprise architecture and what guardrails it needs.

• Track record defining enterprise resiliency standards (RTO/RPO targets, failover patterns, backup and recovery architecture)

• Experience in a regulated environment, ideally pharmaceutical or GxP, where resiliency decisions carry compliance consequence

• Practical experience with cloud resiliency patterns across Azure and/or GCP (multi-region, availability zones, backup/DR services)

• Working knowledge of SRE practices (error budgets, SLO management, observability) at enterprise standard-setting level

Preferred Qualifications

• Enterprise architecture certifications desirable (a recognised cloud or security architecture certification).
• Familiarity with GxP validation requirements as they apply to recovery and continuity architecture

• Experience running or contributing to enterprise-wide DR testing or tabletop exercises

• Exposure to FinOps or cost-to-operate trade-offs in resiliency architecture decisions

• Practical view on governing AI agents operating against production infrastructure, including where autonomous remediation is safe and where it needs a human gate

Work Arrangements:
This role offers a hybrid working model, with a mix of on-site and remote work. Fully remote or home-working arrangements are not available for this role.

Closing Date for Applications – 1 November 2026 EOD

Please take a copy of the Job Description, as this will not be available post closure of the advert.  
When applying for this role, please use the ‘cover letter’ of the online application or your CV to describe how you meet the competencies for this role, as outlined in the job requirements above. The information that you have provided in your cover letter and CV will be used to assess your application.

#LI-Hybrid

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Skills

AI Governance, Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity Software, Cyber Resiliency, Disaster Recovery Solutions, Enterprise Architecture (EA), Enterprise Architecture Governance, Failover, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Recovery Solutions, Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), SRE Observability

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.

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