Associate Director, Service Ops Lead - Talent and L&D

About the Team:   Enterprise Systems is the backbone of GSK’s internal operations in Digital & Tech, enabling GSK Global Functions teams such as Finance, Procurement, HR, Legal, Compliance, WREF, CGA and Corporate Secretariat to run seamlessly. This team designs and delivers cutting-edge digital platforms that power critical processes, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and scalability across the enterprise.         Our HR Digital & Tech team transforms how GSK attracts, develops, and retains talent through innovative technology solutions. From managing global HR platforms to delivering data-driven insights, this function ensures our people have the tools and experiences they need to thrive. Partnering closely with HR business teams, we create solutions that simplify processes, enhance employee engagement, and enable strategic workforce planning. If you’re passionate about technology that empowers people, this is where you can make an impact.   Job Purpose:   The Associate Director, Service Operations Lead – Talent & L&D 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. SuccessFactors), 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.   Key Responsibilities:   • Provide operational leadership across Talent & Data 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 stakehold