Associate Director - IAM Advanced Authentication

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 centered 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 : Every person, workload and AI agent at GSK needs an identity it can prove, credentials that cannot be stolen and access that is just enough, just in time. As our applications move to the cloud and AI agents begin working alongside our people, authentication is becoming the foundation of trust for everything we do. The Associate Director, leads the engineering and delivery of that foundation, starting with single sign-on (SSO) and extending the same discipline to Azure and Google Cloud (GCP), non-human identities (NHI) and AI agents. Our vision: One trusted way to authenticate, whoever or whatever is asking for access: passwordless for people, secretless for workloads and tightly scoped for AI agents. Security should be invisible when everything is right and decisive when it is not. We will get there by using AI securely in our own work, setting the example for the rest of GSK. About the team: Authentication and Cloud Security is part of Identity & Access Management. We build and run SSO for GSK’s workforce and applications, and bring the same discipline to securing the accounts, credentials and authentication of cloud, non-human and AI agent identities. Together with PKI & Cryptographic Services, we protect the identities, secrets and keys that GSK’s cloud and AI future depends on. Key responsibilities: In this role, you will turn that vision into reality. Your responsibilities will include: • Build one team: Lead and develop a global team of engineers across SSO, cloud, NHI and AI agent identity, working as one team with shared patterns rather than separate product silos. • Deliver the roadmap: Own the engineering roadmap, delivery plans and service measures, turning the agreed architecture and standards into reliable services. • Make sign-in passwordless and trusted: Run GSK’s SSO services (SAML, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0), moving the workforce to passwordless, phishing-resistant authentication, with conditional access, strong identity verification for registration and account recovery, and the retirement of legacy authentication. • Secure the cloud: Protect cloud accounts and access in Azure and GCP with strong authentication, workload identity federation, least privilege and just-in-time access, with no standing admin rights. • Bring workloads and AI agents into the fold: Give non-human identities and AI agents unique, accountable identities kept separate from human ones, with protected credentials, scoped and revocable access and full audit logging, and promote integration with GSK’s identity lifecycle and governance processes. • Move from secrets to secretless: Drive adoption of secrets vaulting and management, remove hard-coded credentials, favour short-lived and secretless authentication, and build secret scanning into engineering pipelines. • Partner with PKI: Work with the PKI & Cryptographic Services lead to secure cloud, AI and secrets, with aligned roadmaps, clear ownership and a joined-up approach for stakeholders and auditors. • Use AI ourselves: Apply AI to identity e