R&D Data & AI Director — Agentic AI & Trusted Insights

Gsk; England; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

GSK is seeking a seasoned data and data science leader to shape trusted data, analytics, and agentic AI within R&D. As Director of Data & Data Science, Development Data, you will own strategy, governance, and delivery across R&D data categories while remaining hands-on for substantial explorations and model development.

This role balances leadership with deep technical work in a globally impactful environment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading a data, analytics, or data science organization in a regulated environment, with accountability for strategy, budget, and multiple direct reports.
• Experience leading leaders, such as product owners, engineering managers, or senior individual contributors who own significant scope.
• Track record of setting and executing a multi-year data and data science strategy that secured senior stakeholder support and funding.
• Technical credibility in data engineering and data science, enabling sound architecture, prioritization, hiring, and escalation decisions.
• Willingness and ability to spend at least 50% of working time hands-on—writing code, performing analysis, building and evaluating models, and developing agentic AI systems.
• Experience building or deploying agentic AI systems that perform data-science work, including exploration, hypothesis generation, analysis, and insight generation.
• Working knowledge of R&D data governance, including blinded and unblinded access, GxP considerations, data privacy, and audit readiness.
• Executive communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to make portfolio-level trade‑offs across competing priorities.

Responsibilities

• Shape the R&D data and data science strategy — define an ambitious multi-year vision and translate it into a focused roadmap across all R&D Data Categories.
• Lead the R&D Data Category portfolio — ensure every category has clear ownership, a healthy roadmap, and measurable scientific or business value.
• Direct investment and priorities — balance engineering, data science, platform capacity, technical debt, governance, and innovation across the portfolio.
• Build and develop an outstanding TDPO organization — set clear expectations, resolve cross-category trade‑offs, and lead hiring, organizational design, and career development.
• Champion engineering and data science excellence — embed shared standards, strong review practices, and vibrant communities of practice.
• Safeguard data governance and compliance — drive consistent quality, metadata, access controls, privacy, and audit readiness across R&D data.
• Set the data science and AI agenda — partner with senior scientific leaders to identify, sponsor, and unlock the highest‑value opportunities.
• Create and scale agentic AI data science — personally build systems that explore data, test hypotheses, run analyses, and generate trusted insights with appropriate human oversight.
• Steward technology, funding, and partnerships — shape architecture and tooling, build compelling investment cases, manage budgets, and oversee key supplier relationships.
• Be the voice of the function — influence senior R&D and Enterprise Data & AI leaders and communicate portfolio health, adoption, risk, capacity, and value delivered.

Skills

Agentic AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Clinical Data

Clinical Development

Database Governance

Data Compliance

Data Science

Data Services

Leadership

Leading by Influence

Machine Learning (ML)

OpenAI

People Leadership

Product Strategies

Real World Data

Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder Management

Technical Knowledge

Job description

GSK is seeking a seasoned data and data science leader to shape trusted data, analytics, and agentic AI within R&D. As Director of Data & Data Science, Development Data, you will own strategy, governance, and delivery across R&D data categories while remaining hands-on for substantial explorations and model development.

This role balances leadership with deep technical work in a globally impactful environment.