Head of Data Platforms

About the role

The Head of Data Platforms role requires a technically skilled and hands-on data leader to join the senior leadership team of Pepper Advantage Technologies Limited (PATL). The successful candidate will be responsible for owning a centralised data platform function, supporting and empowering all Pepper group jurisdictions to manage, leverage and monetise data as well as bear responsibility for Data governance and regulatory compliance.

This is a senior leadership role with responsibility for a modern Azure and Snowflake environment, leading teams across platform engineering, quality and governance. You will shape the data platform roadmap, drive delivery across both strategic change and BAU, and play a key role in building a scalable, secure and high-performing data capability.

Location: Madrid (Spain), UK (London, Uxbridge, Skipton), Dublin (Ireland)

Permanent position, hybrid setting model.

Main Responsibilities:

• Own the data platform roadmap, including transformation, semantic layer, orchestration, and the tooling that enables the team to deliver at pace.
• Lead a geographically diverse team of data engineers, setting technical standards and creating space for them to do their best work
• Partner with Product Engineering teams to define contracts and expectations for how data is produced and maintained at source
• Act as the bridge between the Data Platform team and the Credit Intelligence & Predictive Analytics team by providing SME support on data architecture and providing a resilient, scalable and performant platform and data foundation
• Establish data communities of practice across all Group jurisdictions (~40 FTE) to ensure consistency, collaboration and acceleration of best practices and adherence to data governance guidelines and standards.
• Set the self-serve strategy: make data accessible to internal teams, clients and analysts without creating a bottleneck in your team
• Extend the platform for automated and AI-driven systems: Ensure data is structured for programmatic action, with an uncompromising focus on accuracy and observability so that data reporting, visualisation and analytics teams and agents act on a foundation of absolute trust.
• Own the strategy for emerging data types: unstructured data and real-time signals
• Represent the data platform in leadership discussions, translating any technical constraints into business terms
• Drive adoption across the whole organisation (both creators and consumers) to help our core values around data centricity and continuous learning.
• Maintain a strong understanding of applicable regulation, legislative policy, and emerging changes, with clear awareness of their impact on the business and the responsibilities of the role.
• Fully understand and adhere to company policies, procedures, manuals, and standards, while actively promoting ongoing compliance awareness and accountability across direct reports.

Competencies:

• Experienced leading data platform or analytics engineering teams, combining hands-on technical depth with strong people leadership.
• Strategic, commercial and self-motivated, with a strong sense of ownership and accountability for outcomes.
• Systems-oriented and detail-focused, with the ability to maintain quality, accuracy, and control in complex environments and under tight deadlines.
• Strong grasp of governance, risk, and regulatory compliance, with the judgment to enable delivery and innovation responsibly.
• Skilled at building productive relationships across all levels, aligning high-performing individual contributors without micromanaging.
• Clear, concise communicator with strong executive presence and the ability to simplify complex topics for decision-making.
• Experienced in building and scaling high-performing data teams, with clear operating models and strong talent development.
• Decisive and accountable, comfortable making strategic calls on priorities, investment, and technology direction.
• Comfortable operating in data-driven environments where platforms support reporting, analytics, and increasingly automated decision-making.

Your skills

• Minimum 10 years’ experience leading data platform or analytics engineering teams, ideally within a regulated financial services environment.
• Strong background in DataOps, DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and modern engineering best practices.
• Proven track record of improving platform scalability, reliability, quality, security, and governance compliance.
• Experience establishing clear engineering standards, observability practices, and operational runbooks.
• Ability to drive platform optimisation and cost control while supporting growth and performance.
• Strong operational ownership, including service reliability, incident management, and continuous improvement of engineering practices.

Technical requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience with modern data platforms and cloud services - Snowflake (preferred), Databricks, BigQuery, Azure/AWS/GCP, Snaplogic.
• Deep knowledge of data modelling, APIs, event streaming, and cloud-native data architectures.
• Proven ability to design and implement scalable, performant data solutions in complex environments.
• Experience leading teams using agile or product-centric delivery models.
• Strong stakeholder management with the ability to align technical decisions to business goals.
• Experience applying data product thinking or data mesh operating models.
• Background in product architecture or enterprise architecture.
• Knowledge of data cataloguing, lineage, and metadata management tools (Collibra, Alation, Amundsen).
• Familiarity with DevOps/DataOps practices: CI/CD, version control
• Understanding of regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA or PCI (where relevant).

Success Metrics (what you will be measured on)

• DORA: Lead time, Deployment frequency, Change failure rate, MTTR.
• Delivery & Product: Roadmap predictability, value throughput (e.g., OKR progress), time-to-market.
• Reliability: SLO attainment (%), incident rate and severity mix, mean time to detect (MTTD).
• Quality: Escaped defects, defect density, automated test coverage
• Security/Compliance: Vulnerability SLA adherence, audit/control pass rate.
• People & Culture: eNPS, attrition of regrettable talent, internal mobility, DEI indicators.
• Cost & Efficiency: Cloud unit economics, cost-to-serve, build time, onboarding time to first PR.

Pepper Advantage’s values and culture

Our mission is to help people succeed. Our clients, our customers, our employees. Our Values are ‘Can do’, ‘Balanced’ and ‘Real’.

Pepper Advantage’s values support our vision, shape our culture and define how we interact with other employees and the attitudes we adopt towards our customers and clients. The values of Pepper Advantage support the organisation’s mission statement.

Pepper Advantage’s unique outcome focused corporate culture aims to deliver fairness and value for clients and customers, consistently exceeding expectations in all measurable performance areas.

Pepper Advantage is an equal opportunities employer.

Role profiles are subject to change in line with business needs.