Senior Principal, IAM Operations

The Senior Principal, IAM Operations is a senior, hands-on technical lead accountable for transforming IAM operations across GSK's global identity landscape. This role will design, build and operationalise an agentic-AI-enabled operating model that simplifies support, removes repetitive manual work, improves resilience and accelerates service restoration. It combines deep IAM engineering expertise with applied AI, automation, observability and site reliability practices to deliver predictive monitoring, safe autonomous remediation and self-healing identity services.

About the team:

GSK IAM Operations protects and runs the identity estate end to end, covering workforce identities, non-human identities and privileged access dependencies across the enterprise. The team maintains service availability, performance, security and compliance across identity lifecycle processes and platforms.

Key responsibilities:

• Act as the principal hands-on engineer for the transformation of IAM operations across identity governance, directory, authentication, privileged access and non-human identity services.
• Build and integrate secure AI agents and orchestration workflows that triage requests and incidents, investigate root causes, execute approved remediations, update records and continuously improve operational knowledge.
• Identify manual operational activities and systematically eliminate toil through APIs, workflows, scripts, event-driven automation and reusable engineering patterns.
• Implement AI-based observability that correlates identity telemetry, audit events, service health, user experience and security signals to predict degradation and detect abnormal behaviour.
• Engineer safe self-healing capabilities for repeatable failure scenarios, with policy guardrails, confidence thresholds, human approval where required, rollback, full audit trails and measurable outcomes.
• Own technical resolution of critical IAM incidents, prioritising patient safety, product supply, manufacturing continuity, R&D productivity and protection of sensitive information; convert root causes into permanent automated prevention or recovery controls.
• Optimise joiner, mover and leaver processes, access requests, birthright access, certifications, provisioning and deprovisioning across hybrid and cloud environments.
• Strengthen governance and lifecycle management for non-human identities, including service accounts, application identities, workloads, bots, secrets, keys and certificates used by laboratory, manufacturing, clinical, cloud and enterprise services.
• Establish engineering controls for agent identity, least privilege, separation of duties, model and prompt security, data protection, explainability, testing and responsible AI use.
• Create production-grade code, integrations, automated tests, runbooks, dashboards and operational documentation; participate directly in implementation, troubleshooting and on-call escalation.
• Define and report service and transformation measures, including availability, incident reduction, mean time to detect and restore, automation coverage, straight-through processing, toil removed, control effectiveness and impact on critical business services.
• Partner with Cyber Security, Quality, Risk and Compliance, Tech, R&D, Global Supply Chain, application owners and strategic suppliers without direct people-management responsibility.
• Run change management for identity platforms, including testing, approval and rollback.
• Own day-to-day operation of GSK's identity services, including availability, performance and capacity.

Basic Qualifications:

• Substantial experience as a hands-on IAM engineer or architect in complex, large-scale enterprise environments.
• Deep expertise in identity lifecycle management, including joiner, mover and leaver processes, access requests, provisioning, deprovisioning, role and entitlement models, birthright access and access certification.
• Hands-on operational experience with Entra ID, Active Directory and an IGA platform.
• Strong knowledge of non-human identity lifecycle and governance across service accounts, application identities, workload identities, bots, API credentials, secrets, keys and certificates.
• Demonstrated experience designing and deploying AI or generative-AI solutions, including agents, tool use, orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Strong software engineering and automation skills using Python and PowerShell, APIs, source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, testing and secure development practices.
• Proven experience engineering monitoring, event correlation, automated diagnosis and remediation using logs, metrics, traces and security telemetry.
• Expert knowledge of IAM security principles, least privilege, segregation of duties, zero trust, privileged access, auditability and regulatory controls.
• Experience leading complex technical transformation through influence as an individual contributor, from architecture and prototyping through production deployment and measurable adoption.
• Excellent problem-solving, stakeholder communication and technical documentation skills, with the ability to translate operational pain points into scalable engineering solutions.
• Proven experience leading a team or a substantial programme of work.
• Experience managing delivery to plan, quality and timelines.
• Excellent relationship management, influencing and communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure AI services, agent frameworks or comparable enterprise AI platforms.
• Experience integrating ServiceNow workflows, observability platforms, SIEM/SOAR capabilities and IAM platforms for closed-loop operations.
• Experience applying SRE practices, including service-level objectives, error budgets, resilience engineering, chaos testing and blameless problem management.

Typical tools and technologies include:

• Microsoft Entra ID
• Active Directory
• SailPoint or comparable IGA platforms
• PAM platforms
• ServiceNow
• Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI services
• Python
• PowerShell
• REST APIs
• Git and CI/CD
• Infrastructure as code
• SIEM/SOAR
• Observability platforms
• Secrets and certificate management technologies