Senior Program Manager at GSK

Job description

• The Onyx Research Data Tech organization is GSK’s Research data ecosystem which has the capability to bring together, analyze, and power the exploration of data at scale. We partner with scientists across GSK to define and understand their challenges and develop tailored solutions that meet their needs. The goal is to ensure scientists have the right data and insights when they need it to give them a better starting point for and accelerate medical discovery. Ultimately, this helps us get ahead of disease in more predictive and powerful ways.
• Onyx is 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 next-generation, metadata- and automation-driven data experience for GSK’s scientists, engineers, and decision-makers, increasing productivity and reducing time spent on “data mechanics”
• Providing best-in-class AI/ML and data analysis environments to accelerate our predictive capabilities and attract top-tier talent
• Aggressively engineering our data at scale, as one unified asset, to unlock the value of our unique collection of data and predictions inreal-time
• Oversight of the program of work is key to successful execution of this mission. The Onyx Tech Delivery & Assurance team is accountable for defining, building, and executing on our internal processes for agile planning and delivery across our entire portfolio. They ensure that the leadership of the Onyx organization and key partners / stakeholders have a transparent view into our overall progress, and that issues / blockers / misalignments are raised early before they become major problems. They partner with our product and engineering leadership to ensure our overall ways of working, including software delivery, are best-in-class and set us up for success.
• The Senior Program Manager is accountable for supporting Onyx Application Engineering with program and project management needs, ensuring quality in standard ways of working including appropriate documentation, resource tracking and capacity planning to ensure successful program/project delivery. Partner with Product Managers to devise and execute realistic, achievable and high‑quality plans that describe tasks required to deliver Onyx products across multiple engineering teams. A Senior Program Manager is expected to take a poorly defined problem with a large degree of ambiguity, work it to a well‑defined problem/specification, and execute on it at a high level.
• This role will lead large‑scale, multi‑track programs that include multiple dependencies across engineering, data, cloud and external partners.
• Practical experience configuring, governing and using Atlassian toolsets (Jira, Confluence, Advanced Roadmaps/Portfolio and related automation/plugins) to support agile delivery, traceability and reporting is essential to succeed in this role. The successful candidate will have a strong drive to deliver projects quickly without sacrificing high quality, embedding effective controls and practices that enable safe, repeatable and auditable delivery.

Key Responsibilities include-

• Define and manage overall program governance and delivery model for complex technical initiatives, including program level milestones, success criteria, decision rights, and the running of program boards and steering committees. Act as the primary escalation point for cross functional delivery issues; coordinate rapid remediation plans, conduct root cause analysis for major incidents or delivery failures, and drive corrective actions to closure.
• Develop and manage project and program plans; drive execution within scope, time and budget which may dynamically evolve to reflect changes in customer needs or business constraints.
• Lead large scale, multi-track programs with cross functional dependencies and external partners.
• Lead Shiprooms and agile sprint ceremonies, project tracking/reporting and backlog management with product managers. Provide a single view of each project within the portfolio and their interdependencies, establishing effective OKRs, robust documentation and project value/financial tracking.
• Partner with Onyx engineering leads, Quality team and product managers to validate technical designs and ensure delivery approaches are scalable, secure, cost effective and aligned to Onyx platform and cloud architecture standards.
• Implement and govern program level project management discipline (tools and process) across product deliverables. Provide hands on leadership in designing, configuring and maintaining Atlassian based delivery processes including board and workflow design, issue type schemes, custom fields, permissions, automation rules, release pipelines, Advanced Roadmaps/Portfolio configuration, and dashboarding to ensure consistent practices, traceability and high-quality reporting across teams.
• Leverage Atlassian and AI enabled reporting capabilities, including agentic models where appropriate, to align with Onyx Jira/Confluence configurations and common plugins/automation; support governance implementation by configuring integrations between Atlassian tooling and reporting/BI systems to help provide a single source of truth.
• Manage third party and vendor engagements for program components: define statements of work (SOWs), review vendor delivery
• plans, measure supplier performance and ensure contractual and compliance requirements are met.
• Establish and track program KPIs and health metrics (delivery cadence, predictability, cycle time, MTTR, scope variance, OKR progress); present these regularly to leadership and make data driven recommendations to improve delivery.
• Define appropriate tracking measures and build automated, meaningful reports and dashboards; synthesize data and insights from across projects or programs to support teams in making informed tactical and strategic decisions. ·
• Lead change control and release coordination across multiple teams and environments; ensure release readiness, run release gates, and coordinate rollback/contingency planning where required.
• Ensure that robust risk management practice is embedded within Onyx projects and that risks and opportunities are identified and addressed, or that risks requiring collective senior discussion are escalated to the Onyx leadership team.
• Drive continuous improvement across delivery practices: run retrospectives at program scale, capture lessons learned, update processes and templates, and embed improvements into team practices and Atlassian tooling/templates.
• Mentor and coach program and delivery leads; build delivery capability by defining clear roles and responsibilities, career development pathways and by running enablement sessions on program practices, dependency and risk management, and effective Atlassian tooling usage.

Why You?

Basic Qualifications

We are looking for professionals with these required skills to achieve our goals:

• Bachelor’s degree in IT Program Management, Data Engineering, Computer science, Software Engineering
• 6+ years job-related experience with an established track record of Program delivery for software applications.
• 4+ years’ experience in Agile program/project management, including the use of associated tools such as Jira and Confluence.

Preferred Experience

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

• Masters Degree
• Demonstrated comfort operating and leading across organizational boundaries a matrixed team
• Metrics-first mindset