Director - SN & Ent. Tools Operations Excellence

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. Job Purpose  The ServiceNow Platform & Enterprise Tools Service Operations Lead is responsible for ensuring the stable, compliant, and reliable operation of core systems and platforms within the ServiceNow Platform & Enterprise Tools 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. ServiceNow), ensuring they meet agreed service levels and adhere to security and compliance expectations. Operating at a senior level, the role provides leadership across operational teams, acts as the primary escalation point for platform issues, and partners with Product/Platform Owners, architects, engineering teams, and IT service functions to maintain platform stability and drive continuous improvement. Key Responsibilities • Provide operational leadership across core 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 fulfi