Senior Finance Partner – Translational & Developmental Sciences

Role Overview

• Act as the lead Senior Finance Partner for TDS, providing forward-looking financial leadership, insight, and constructive challenge to senior business stakeholders to shape priorities and portfolio choices
• Influence strategic choices by translating complex financial and operational data into clear, decision-oriented insights —including value, opportunity cost, timing, and risk
• Partner across Finance, Commercial, R&D, Manufacturing, Portfolio and Corporate functions to ensure enterprise alignment, coherent narratives, and transparent trade-offs in value and data-based decisions
• Provide finance leadership for the Translational Hub, including resource model and ramp-up plan, and ongoing performance insights to ensure productivity and value delivery
• Lead the financial evaluation of investments, business cases, and scenarios with a portfolio lens, ensuring assumptions are robust, risks are understood, and trade-offs/opportunity costs are explicit
• Partner with TDS leaders to define, measure, and improve R&D productivity (e.g., resource utilisation, throughput, cycle times, cost to deliver, and value per FTE), using insight to drive prioritisation, stop/start decisions, and reinvestment
• Own and lead planning, budgeting, and forecasting for the area of responsibility, translating strategy into resourcing and financial plans while balancing robustness with pragmatism
• Drive performance management through root-cause and driver analysis, leading indicators, and forward-looking outlooks—linking insights to clear actions and decisions
• Be accountable for the integrity, accuracy, and transparency of financial reporting, forecasts, and valuations—ensuring decision makers have a trusted fact base
• Maintain strong control and compliance standards—applying pragmatic risk management and fit-for-purpose processes that enable pace while protecting value and reputation in line with GSK policies and Finance Ways of Working
• Understand balance sheet, P&L, and cash flow impacts of strategic choices, including capital allocation implications, valuation sensitivities, and risk of impairments where relevant
• Lead identification of opportunities to optimise spend, improve productivity, and reallocate resources to the highest-value priorities; quantify benefits and track delivery
• Champion continuous improvement, simplification, and automation of finance insights and processes (including analytics and self-serve reporting), enabling Finance to focus on higher-value strategic work
• Build strong, trusted relationships with senior stakeholders through credibility, curiosity and strategic storytelling; influence without authority to drive alignment and action
• Line manager responsibilities for a small team, focused on coaching, capability building, and building a high-performing culture

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in finance or accounting (or qualified by experience)
• Experience as a Finance Partner in a business unit environment – ideally in R&D
• Track record of driving sound business decision making in relation to complex problems based on robust, impartial financial analysis
• Track record of setting and delivering financial plans
• Strong skills in modelling, analysis, forecasting, strategic / scenario planning, and decision making.
• Some project management skills.
• Understanding of financial systems and processes (e.g., SAP, CERPS, SAC)
• Ability to work in a complex and fast-moving environment with multiple priorities
• Ability to connect with and influence business stakeholders at all levels in a technical environment and to establish a high level of credibility with senior internal and third-party stakeholders.

Benefits

• Equal Opportunity Employer
• Flexible working hours
• Professional development opportunities