Senior Director, Global Head of Sample Management

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GSK is bringing the physical and digital sides of sample management together under a single global leader for the first time. You will lead a global organisation spanning automated storage, sample preparation and logistics, automation engineering and a digital sample platform built and owned within the function, serving the full range of modalities in our portfolio — from small molecules through large molecules, oligonucleotides and conjugates to emerging formats.

The role exists because of where discovery is going. GSK’s Lab-in-an-Automated-Loop (LIAL) programme is moving research towards continuous, increasingly autonomous design–make–test–analyse cycles. An autonomous laboratory has a hard requirement for sample registration the moment a new molecule is made, for storage that knows its own state, and for plating and delivery that an automated workflow can call without a person in the loop.

Sample Management has moved from a support service to a rate‑limiting dependency for the entire GSK research ecosystem.

The scale is substantial — collections numbering in the millions of samples and growing quickly in the newer modalities, high‑capacity automated stores measured in millions of tubes, millions of assay‑ready wells dispensed each year, and routine international distribution to partners across dozens of countries.

This is deliberately a combined role, and the combination is the point. Sample Management is already a strong, high‑performing global operation. What changes is the standard it now has to meet: autonomous, closed‑loop science asks for cycle times, data quality and traceability beyond what any sample function was originally designed to deliver, and reaching that standard means running the physical estate and the digital product as a single system.

It needs a leader who is credible on both sides — someone who has run a high‑throughput physical operation and has carried real accountability for a digital product and its data. You will report to the VP, Data, Automation and Predictive Sciences and join the DAPS leadership team.

For candidates seeking to be located at our Stevenage site, this role will temporarily be based ever, the Company plans to relocate its offices to Cambridge, UK. The location of this role will therefore subsequently change to Cambridge, UK in accordance with timelines to be set by the Company. The relocation is currently proposed to take effect by early 2029.

This role will provide YOU the opportunity to lead key activities to progress YOUR career. These responsibilities include some of the following:

• Define and deliver a single global strategy and roadmap for physical and digital sample management across modalities and sites, aligned to LIAL and our priority technology programmes, with clear outcome measures.
• Lead leaders: the US and UK Sample Management leads, together with dedicated digital and platform capability held inside the function, as one global, service‑oriented team — and build the hybrid talent that combines sample science, automation engineering, informatics and data.
• Act as accountable business and product owner for the Sample Management…