Head of Data

Head of Data / Data Platform Lead | Financial Services | 2 days a week onsite, Bristol or London | Up to £120k | Permanent

A well-known UK financial services business is part way through a properly funded technology transformation, and the data platform sits at the centre of it. This is a new role, created because the platform has outgrown being one part of someone else's job.

You'll lead a team of around eight, including an architect, principal and senior engineers and DevOps, with an offshore support function behind them. The platform runs on AWS and Snowflake and the remit covers all of it: ingestion, pipelines, permissions, data quality, orchestration and observability. Over the next few years it has to carry a legacy migration, new client-facing applications, BI and analytics, and an ML platform.

It isn't a coding role. It's for someone who has been a strong engineer, now leads engineers, and is as comfortable talking about idempotent pipelines and cost per query as about what the business gets for the money.

What matters most:

Breadth across the whole platform, not depth in one corner of it Leading senior engineers in a regulated environment, ideally financial services Framing technical work in terms of business outcomes Setting the standard on testing, CI/CD, observability and incident response

Whether you've worked on AWS or GCP, Snowflake or Databricks matters far less than the above.