The posting
Enterprise AI (EAI) builds the data foundations that GSK's AI systems depend on. In our operating model, digital workers do the hands-on data engineering. They generate pipelines, test and deploy them, monitor them in production and remediate failures. Our engineers design the system those digital workers operate in.
At the centre of that system is a governed context layer. It makes data, meaning, permissions and history retrievable at the moment they are needed, and sits above our data platforms and beneath every experience and agent built on them.
The Staff Data Engineer is accountable for implementing and evolving the governed context layer that humans and digital workers use across EAI, and is EAI's internal authority on data architecture for AI.
- Owns the governed context layer as the shared foundation every human and digital worker in EAI relies on, accountable for its architecture, implementation and evolution.
- Defines the system digital workers engineer within through the standards, frameworks, contracts and guardrails that let them build and operate pipelines safely, consistently and at scale.
- Raises the standard of data engineering for AI across EAI through the architecture, governance and engineering practices others adopt, and through the senior engineers the role develops.
Key Responsibilities:
Context & Semantics
- Implement and evolve the governed context layer as a product: one layer across enterprise knowledge, structured data, business vocabulary and modelled ontologies, queried by humans and digital workers at run time.
- Build the capabilities the layer depends on: reliable cataloguing across structured and unstructured data, AI-assisted metadata enrichment, context design for each use case, secure agent access over standard protocols such as MCP, and routing across sources.
- Make certified meaning machine-readable so that every number a digital worker returns resolves to one governed definition, with clear ownership and lineage.
Agent-Operated Data Engineering
- Define the architecture standards and shared frameworks that digital workers use to generate, test, deploy and monitor pipelines, reducing the integration cost of each new AI initiative.
- Set the operating model for agent-generated engineering work: what digital workers do autonomously, what requires human approval, how quality is evaluated and how incidents escalate. Lead the incidents digital workers cannot resolve, from detection to permanent resolution.
AI Data Infrastructure & Lifecycle
- Shape EAI's AI data infrastructure strategy across feature engineering, vector and retrieval infrastructure, streaming data flows and evaluation data design, building shared components that multiple AI initiatives depend on in production.
- Define EAI's MLOps data practices: versioning, lineage, drift monitoring, evaluation dataset governance and model data lifecycle management, extended to the context and evaluation data that digital workers rely on.
Governance & Responsible Data
- Define EAI's responsible data governance standards for AI pipelines, covering privacy, consent, PII, auditability and bias controls, and encode them in the governed context layer so humans and digital workers apply them by default.
- Shape data quality and lineage at scale across multiple data domains, with measurable outcomes in error rates, downstream AI performance and audit readiness.
Platform & Infrastructure
- Design EAI's data platform architecture with infrastructure as code throughout and platform-as-product thinking, so new data and AI projects start quickly and consistently.
- Build shared platform components that AI initiatives, engineering teams and digital workers depend on in production, and own their reliability, performance, cost and security.
Standards & Technical Leadership
- Define data engineering standards for code, documentation and review, written to be followed by humans and digital workers alike, and drive their adoption across EAI.
- Develop senior engineers towards greater architectural independence, and partner with forward deployed engineers (FDEs), ML engineers, platform engineers and domain experts on the data requirements of production AI systems.
Why You? Basic Qualification We are seeking professionals with the following required skills and qualifications to help us achieve our goals:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of data engineering experience, including experience defining data architecture for production AI or machine learning (ML) systems.
- Experience building data infrastructure for AI systems, including feature stores, vector databases, retrieval architectures, streaming data pipelines and evaluation datasets.
- Experience building context, metadata or semantic infrastructure used by AI systems, such as data catalogues, business glossaries, knowledge graphs or ontologies, exposed to AI agents through protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Experience designing and operating AI agents or large language model (LLM)-powered systems within data workflows, including evaluation, guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls.
- Experience defining data quality, lineage and governance standards for AI pipelines across multiple data domains, including privacy, consent, personally identifiable information (PII) handling and auditability.
- Experience with cloud data platforms and infrastructure as code, including experience setting engineering standards.
Preferred Qualification If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus:
- Prior Staff, Principal or equivalent experience in an organisation operating a non-trivial data platform for AI.
- Experience in a regulated industry, such as life sciences, where data integrity and auditability are mandatory.
- Public technical contributions, such as talks, writing or open source, on data architecture for AI, context engineering or agent-operated data engineering.
- Experience defining pipeline architecture standards for use across enterprise AI and multiple AI initiatives
- Experience implementing and evolving governed context and semantic layers used by people and AI systems at run time. Knowledge of data architecture for AI, including feature engineering, vector infrastructure, streaming and evaluation data design.
- Experience with versioning, lineage, evaluation dataset governance and model data lifecycle management.
- Experience designing cloud data platform architecture and applying infrastructure-as-code and platform-as-product practices and building reusable platform components that support multiple AI initiatives, engineering teams and AI systems.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, supporting architectural decision-making and advising on complex data challenges
What Success Looks Like
In the first 12 months, the person in this role will have:
- Taken the governed context layer from separate capabilities to a single layer in production, used by humans and digital workers across multiple AI initiatives.
- Established the standards, frameworks and evaluation model under which digital workers generate and operate pipelines, with a measurable reduction in manual engineering effort.
- Defined EAI's responsible data governance and MLOps data practices, with controls encoded in the context layer and adopted across multiple data domains.
- Raised the architectural independence of EAI's senior engineers through standards and coaching.
Work Arrangement This role is based in the United States and follows a hybrid working model. You will be expected to collaborate on-site roughly two days per week. Remote work outside of this arrangement is not available for this role.
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Skills
Computer Programming, Data Analysis, Data Architecture Development, Databricks Unified Data Analytics Platform, Data Engineering, Data Governance, Data Ingestion, Data Integration, Data Migrations, Data Modeling, Data Transformation, ETL Development, Performance Tuning, Structured Query Language (SQL)
Please visit GSK US Benefits Summary to learn more about the comprehensive benefits program GSK offers US employees.
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.
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