Lead Major Incident Manager
GSK · Durham Blackwell Street, United States
Business Introduction
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.
Position Summary
The Digital & Tech Command Centre operates 24x7x365 to protect GSK’s critical sites, applications and services. Disruption or degradation to these directly impacts patient supply, research and colleague productivity.
This role owns and leads the end-to-end response to Major Incidents (P1) and managed high-priority (P2) incidents. In collaboration with AI-enabled monitoring, detection and triage capabilities, the role directs resolver
teams and subject matter experts from across Tech towards the fastest possible restoration of service, while providing accurate, timely and audience-appropriate communication to end users, senior stakeholders and
executive leadership. The role also assesses incidents for crisis potential, secures the quality of the incident record for downstream Problem Management, and drives continuous improvement in prevention, detection and response - including the adoption of AI and automation to shorten time to detect, time to engage and time to restore. As a more experienced member of the Major Incident Manager team, the role additionally acts as an escalation point within the team, to support less experienced colleagues, as well as to field senior stakeholders’ questions and requests for information. Additionally, the role supports management of the shift rota, supports the personal
development of Major Incident Managers through structured feedback and mentoring and leads service-related objectives such as Continual Service Improvement (CSI) initiatives.
Key Responsibilities
This role will provide YOU the opportunity to lead key activities to progress YOUR career. These responsibilities include some of the following:
Major Incident Response & Command
- Own the end-to-end management of Major Incidents (P1) and managed high-priority (P2) incidents, from detection through to confirmed service restoration, acting as the single point of control for the duration of the incident.
- Rapidly establish impact, urgency and scope, confirm correct prioritisation, and drive immediate engagement of the right resolver teams, subject matter experts and vendors.
- Lead technical bridges with authority, keeping activity focused on restoration, controlling scope, and ensuring hypotheses are tested and eliminated systematically.
- Drive and record decisions under pressure – balancing speed of restoration against risk.
- Drive resolution against agreed major incident targets, escalating promptly where progress stalls or
- additional authority, resource or vendor commitment is required.
Communication & Stakeholder Management
- Own incident communications, producing accurate, timely and audience-appropriate updates, including for senior leaders, at agreed intervals.
- Translate complex technical detail into clear business impact language, setting realistic expectations on restoration.
- Act as an escalation point for senior stakeholders’ questions and requests for information, coordinating accurate, consistent responses across resolver teams and owning follow-up through to closure.
Incident Assessment, Categorisation & Escalation
- Continuously assess live incidents for impact, applying criteria to determine appropriate handling.
- Trigger escalation routes without delay, providing the initial situational assessment.
- Maintain awareness of site criticality, business-critical periods and service dependencies so that escalation decisions reflect true business risk.
Service Quality, Data & Continuous Improvement
- Secure the quality, completeness and accuracy of the incident record – timeline, impact, actions taken and causal indicators – so that Problem Management can be effective.
- Lead or contribute to post-incident reviews, ensuring findings, follow-up actions and preventative measures are captured, owned and tracked to closure.
- Identify recurring themes, fragile services and gaps in monitoring, alerting, knowledge or runbooks, and feed these into improvement initiatives.
- Contribute to the development and adoption of AI, automation and data-driven tooling that shorten time to detect, time to engage and time to restore.
- Drive continual improvements into process and playbooks.
- Lead defined service-related objectives, such as Continual Service Improvement (CSI) initiatives, owning them end to end and tracking measurable improvement.
Shift Operations & Readiness
- Operate as part of a 24x7x365 shift pattern, including public holiday and on-call working as required.
- Support management of the shift rota, helping to ensure balanced, compliant 24x7x365 cover across regions, and flagging gaps, fatigue and coverage risks to the Senior Major Incident Manager.
- Deliver rigorous shift handovers so that live incidents, risks and pending actions transfer seamlessly with no loss of context or momentum.
- Maintain personal and team readiness through participation in recovery tests, crisis simulations and major incident rehearsals.
Team Leadership & Development
- Acts as an escalation point within the team, providing support to less experienced colleagues.
- Support the personal development of Major Incident Managers, including through structured feedback sessions and mentoring, helping to raise the capability, consistency and resilience of the MIM
- community.
- Approach and Collaboration
- Bring a team-first collaborative mindset and approach, to ensure effective cross-functional working.
Why You?
Basic Qualification
We are seeking professionals with the following required skills and qualifications to help us achieve our goals
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant field (e.g. Computer Science, IT or Engineering), or equivalent experience.
- 7+ years in IT service operations within a large, complex, global organisation, including time in a Major Incident Management role.
- ITIL v4 certification is required.
- Experience with leading P1 incidents end to end, directing multiple technical teams and third parties concurrently.
- Experience communicating during live incidents to a range of audiences, including senior leaders, under time pressure.
- Experience working to defined service levels and KPIs, with evidence of improving incident response performance.
- Experience of 24x7 shift-based and on-call working, including structured handover.
- Experience of enterprise ITSM tooling (ServiceNow preferred) and
- monitoring/alerting platforms.
- Experience in a regulated industry (pharmaceutical, life sciences, financial services or similar) desirable
Preferred Qualification
If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus
- Composure and personal authority under pressure, with the ability to lead specialists who do not report to the role.
- Excellent verbal and written communication, moving fluently between technical detail and business impact.
- Strong facilitation and questioning skills to keep a bridge focused and eliminate hypotheses systematically.
- Sound judgement in balancing speed of restoration against risk.
- Analytical mindset, interpreting service data and operational metrics to inform improvement.
- Strong documentation and process-design capability.
- Fluency in written and spoken English
#GSK-LI
Skills
Audits Compliance, Automation Tec