Product Director, Pattern & AI Driven Automation Fixed Term Contract - 18 Months

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.

Purpose & Key Responsibilities

A single role spanning the business-facing automation design team and the automation engineering team, acting as the single point of accountability across both.

Automation Design

• Work with business analysts to understand end-to-end scope and business and user requirements.
• Define the to-be process, including where human-in-the-loop steps are required.
• Design for radical change and make the process automation-ready, rather than digitising today's process as-is.
• Build toward progressively adding intelligence so that decision-making is automated, not only task execution.
• Work with business subject-matter experts to challenge current limitations and design choices: distinguishing genuine legal/compliance constraints from workarounds and deciding what belongs in the future state.
• Align delivery to the multi-year strategic vision for increasingly mature automation of both tasks and decision-making.

Automation Engineering (Delivery)

• Carry business and user requirements into engineering so solutions are built correctly and consistently within the common architecture.
• Represent the business and end user in day-to-day engineering conversations.
• Shape the delivery roadmap with vendors and internal resource and align it with other workstreams and partner programmes.
• Manage resource and performance; oversee testing, validation and acceptance criteria; and prepare each automation for launch.

Cross-Workstream Partnership

• Partner with the supporting capability workstreams (e.g. component management, intelligence/decisioning, and content or object generation) as capability providers.
• Maintain delivery alignment and consistent ways of working to catch blockers and missed dependencies and align roadmaps for programme increment and sprint planning.

Why You!

Basic Qualifications & Experience

While we value demonstrated capability of experience, we would typically expect candidates for this senior role to possess:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a scientific or quantitative discipline (e.g. computer science, engineering, mathematics, life sciences).
• Significant experience in product management strategy and product transformation in complex matrixed organisations, including hands-on delivery of AI, agentic, or automation products.
• A track record of owning products or major delivery initiatives end-to-end, working directly with engineering teams to ship them.
• Experience in the life sciences industry, ideally within R&D or a related scientific domain.

Capabilities

We are looking for professionals with the following capabilities:

• Product Ownership and Delivery: Proven track record owning digital, automation, or platform products across the full lifecycle, including AI or agent-based automations. You translate business and user requirements into a build engineering can execute, own the delivery roadmap with internal teams and vendors and stay accountable from requirements through testing, validation and launch. You design for the future-state process and push toward genuine automation rather than digitising the manual process as-is, and you work fluently in agile and scrum ways of working.
• AI, Agents and Automation: Direct experience delivering AI and automation solutions, ideally including agentic systems that automate decision-making, not only task execution. You understand where large language models, agents and automation genuinely fit, where a human-in-the-loop step is required and where an idea over-promises. You can hold credible conversations with engineering on model and agent capabilities, evaluation, and the architecture needed to build automations that mature over time.
• Executive Influence Without Authority: Demonstrated track record of building trusted partnerships with senior executives (VP/SVP level) and driving outcomes across a matrixed organisation where you don't own the resources. You know how to bring people along, secure buy-in and turn alignment into action.
• Systems Thinking and Operating Model Design: You see organisations as systems: how decisions get made, how work flows and where it gets stuck. You've designed governance structures, operating models, or ways of working that have held up at scale. You're as comfortable with the org chart as you are with the strategy deck.
• Strategic Problem-Solving in Ambiguity: You can take a vague objective from a leadership team ("we need to figure out X") and turn it into a structured initiative with a clear problem statement, hypothesis and path to a recommendation. You move fluently between strategic altitude and operational detail without losing either.
• Narrative and Communication: You can translate complex, cross-cutting work into a clear, compelling story for executive and cross-functional audiences. You know which KPIs matter, how to frame progress honestly and how to make a portfolio of product and process work feel like one coherent direction of travel.
• Domain Fluency: Direct experience in Pharmaceutical R&D, clinical development, or an adjacent scientific domain. You understand the core challenges and opportunities in bringing a medicine to market and you can engage credibly with both scientific and technology leaders.