Staff Application Engineer

Overview

The Onyx Research Data Tech organization represents a major investment by GSK R&D and Digital & Tech, designed to deliver a step-change in our ability to leverage data, knowledge, and prediction to find new medicines. We are a full-stack shop consisting of product and portfolio leadership, data engineering, infrastructure and Dev Ops, data / metadata / knowledge platforms, and AI/ML and analysis platforms, all geared toward building a next-generation data experience for GSK’s scientists, engineers, and decision-makers;

providing best-in-class AI/ML and data analysis environments; aggressively engineering data at scale; and implementing scientific technology products that leverage the data and capabilities provisioned by Onyx.

As a Staff Application Engineer (Individual Contributor), you are a highly experienced technical leader who delivers high-impact engineering outcomes across multiple teams and products without formal people management responsibilities. You will take ambiguous, cross-functional problems from concept to scalable solutions; drive architecture and systems design that meet Onyx’s standards for security, reliability, and performance; raise the quality bar for engineering excellence;

and mentor engineers to level up their technical and operational capabilities. You will own the operation of the applications you build, lead the resolution of complex incidents, and champion best practices in observability, testing, and automation. Your work directly increases the value we deliver to GSK’s scientific community.

• Lead architecture and systems design for full-stack, data-driven, loosely coupled cloud applications; make pragmatic trade-offs that balance speed, quality, and long-term stability.
• Take poorly defined, high-ambiguity problems and drive them to a clear specification and execution plan; deliver solutions with cross-organizational impact and value.
• Own end-to-end delivery of large, strategic engineering initiatives, often crossing collective boundaries; ensure alignment to agreed target architectures and standards.
• Write high-quality, well-tested code and documentation; produce proposals, runbooks, and operational playbooks that enable clarity, maintenance, and scaling.
• Champion operational excellence: design for reliability and security, implement comprehensive observability (metrics, logs, traces), and ensure robust alerting and SLOs.
• Operate and support production systems: participate in on-call, lead incident resolution when needed, perform root-cause analysis, and drive durable follow-ups that reduce risk.
• Proactively refactor and simplify complex systems; repay technical debt with intent and measurable outcomes; improve performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Develop APIs (REST/Graph
  
  QL/gRPC) and integration contracts that are resilient, secure, and well documented; advocate for consistent patterns across teams.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, data science, compliance/risk, and platform teams to align architectural decisions with user needs and organizational strategy.
• Mentor and sponsor engineers across teams (including senior engineers): raise coding standards, guide design choices, and help others navigate trade-offs and delivery.
• Elevate engineering practices across Onyx: standard-bearer for code reviews, test automation, CI/CD, accessibility, performance, and security-first design.
• Use data to inform decisions; introduce monitoring where needed to improve product and operational outcomes; communicate risk clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Stay current with relevant technologies (cloud-native services, data platforms, front-end frameworks); bring strategic insights that shape area-level technology direction.
• Contribute to cross-team initiatives that improve ways of working, incident management, support processes, and the overall quality bar for Onyx Application Engineering.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of experience delivering complex, production-grade, cloud applications at scale.
• Experience with backend language and ecosystem (e.g.,…