Job purpose:

• Associate Director, Service Ops Lead - People Services and Reward is responsible for ensuring the stable, compliant, and reliable operation of select systems and platforms within the HR Digital & Tech domain. The role oversees day-to-day platform operations and ensures that processes are followed, risks are managed, and changes are delivered safely. It maintains the operational performance of multiple platforms (e.g. Workday), ensuring they meet agreed service levels and adhere to security and compliance expectations. The role also provides leadership across operational service teams and partner-delivered support services, ensuring effective service delivery, proactive issue management, continuous improvement, and strong coordination across business, technology, security, infrastructure, product, and vendor teams. 
• This role operates under GSK's "Performance with Choice" hybrid working approach, typically expecting 2–3 days per week in the office, with the specific pattern agreed between the successful candidate and their manager based on role and team needs. 

Responsibilities:

• Provide operational leadership across People Services and Reward platforms, ensuring system stability, availability, and adherence to service levels, acting as the primary internal escalation point for product and domain teams on service performance and major incidents. 

• Govern incident, problem, change, configuration, and release processes for domain platforms, ensuring operational compliance with ITSM policies and control frameworks, and defining measurable outcomes for problem management (e.g., RCA closure time, recurrence prevention, defect trend reduction). 

• Define and maintain service readiness and runbook quality standards (e.g. ServiceNow Knowledge), ensuring escalation paths, support tasks, data handling, continuity steps, and deployment impacts are captured and validated before go-live. 

• Create and oversee service plans for new and enhanced products, coordinating with Product Owners, third-party partners, and platform/service teams to define SLAs, performance expectations, and support handover criteria. 

• Monitor platform performance, proactively identifying risks, trends, and recurring issues, and implement improvement actions to strengthen stability and user experience. 

• Coordinate with Platform Owners, engineering squads, solution architects, and service teams to ensure changes, integrations, upgrades, and releases are deployed safely and meet operational readiness standards. 

• Lead operational readiness assessments, ensuring documentation, support models, monitoring coverage, and non-functional controls are in place prior to deployment. 

• Own operational dashboards, KPIs, and reporting for the platforms, ensuring performance, risks, and issues are communicated to senior stakeholders. 

• Oversee root cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring sustainable fixes, clear remediation actions, and preventative measures are identified and delivered. 

• Maintain and continuously improve operational documentation, including runbooks, support procedures, configuration inventories, and architectural operational views. 

• Manage relationships with third-party vendors and managed service providers to ensure high-quality operational support and fulfilment of contractual obligations. 

• Lead, mentor, and coordinate operational support teams and partner resources across areas such as service desk, platform support, infrastructure, cloud services, and application operations, ensuring clear accountability, timely delivery, and effective escalation management. 

• Collaborate with security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, product, and engineering teams to ensure access controls, data handling, cyber security requirements, operational controls, and compliance standards are embedded into day-to-day service operations. 

• Where required, support extended operational coverage, escalation, or on-call arrangements for critical incidents, major releases, or high-priority business events.

Required skills:

• 15–19 years of experience in platform operations, enterprise application support, IT service management, system administration, or technical delivery within complex environments.
• Strong experience supporting business-critical HR platforms such as Workday, Payroll, and Time systems.
• Proven expertise in ITSM processes, including incident, problem, change, release, and configuration management.
• Experience with enterprise tools such as ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps, monitoring, and knowledge management platforms.
• Strong understanding of system integrations, cloud technologies, monitoring, security, access controls, compliance, resilience, and business continuity.
• Proven ability to manage platform performance, troubleshoot operational issues, lead root cause analysis, and drive continuous improvement.
• Experience partnering with engineering, architecture, and product teams to ensure operational readiness and safe deployment of changes.
• Experience maintaining runbooks, support procedures, operational KPIs, risk indicators, dashboards, and readiness assessments.
• Experience working in Agile/DevOps environments, supporting continuous delivery while maintaining platform stability.
• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience. ITIL, cloud, Agile/Scrum, or DevOps certifications are desirable. 

Preferred skills:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving capability, especially in complex operational scenarios. 

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to provide clarity during incidents and complex change cycles. 

• Strong understanding of security, compliance, and operational risk controls. 

• Ability to lead cross-functional teams, influence without direct authority, and promote operational discipline. 

• Effective organisational skills, able to balance multiple priorities and manage time-sensitive escalations. 

• Strong leadership and coaching capability, with the ability to develop others, build collaboration, and create a high-performing service culture. 

• Strong vendor, stakeholder, and relationship management skills, with the ability to influence outcomes and drive accountability across internal and external teams. 
• Ability to work flexibly across time zones and support critical service events, releases, or escalations where required. 

• Ability to work in a very fast-paced and fluid environment  

• Comfortable with ambiguity and change

Skills

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.

Inclusion at GSK:

As an employer committed to Inclusion, we encourage you to reach out if you need any adjustments during the recruitment process.

Please contact our Recruitment Team at [email protected] to discuss your needs.

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