Director of Data Engineering

Overview

In this leadership role, you own and shape the organisation’s data architecture and platform, partnering with senior leaders to translate data into commercial value. You drive a scalable cloud data platform and establish DataOps, governance, quality, and observability to support analytics, forecasting, and emerging AI/ML capabilities. You lead a high-performing data engineering function and own budgets and vendor relationships. The role offers influence across cross-functional teams to advance the company’s data and AI roadmap in a hybrid Central London setting.

Responsibilities

• Define and own enterprise data architecture and technical roadmap
• Lead development of a scalable modern cloud data platform
• Own data modelling, architecture, governance, quality and operational resilience
• Build data foundations to support AI, ML, vector search and advanced analytics
• Establish DataOps, CI/CD, observability and data quality practices
• Lead and develop the data engineering function
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science and senior leadership to turn data into commercial value
• Own budgets, vendors and cloud cost optimisation

Key requirements

• 12+ years of data engineering experience with substantial leadership experience
• Strong experience across cloud data architecture, Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery, SQL, Python, data modelling and modern data engineering practices
• Experience in AI/ML, knowledge graphs, unstructured data, SaaS or customer-facing data products (advantageous)
• Technically credible leader who can set strategy, challenge architecture, lead teams and engage with detail

• strategic vision
• strong communication with cross-functional partners
• people leadership and team development
• cloud data architecture
• Snowflake
• Databricks