Head of Data & Analytics - Leading Edge - Financial Services (FinTech Start-up)
Head of Data & Analytics
Department: Technology
Reporting to: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Location: London (Hybrid)
Client
My client is a rapidly growing UK fintech providing innovative consumer lending solutions through proprietary technology. As an FCA regulated business, data sits at the heart of everything we do—from customer acquisition and lending decisions through to financial reporting, regulatory compliance and operational performance.
As this exciting and profitable business continues to scale, we are investing in a modern enterprise data platform that provides a trusted, accurate and consistent view of the business.
Working closely with the CTO and C-suite, this is an opportunity for an experienced Head of Data & Analytics to shape data in this business and to be at the leading edge of data strategy, as the business continues to scale.
The Opportunity
This is not a traditional data engineering role.
We are looking for someone who combines strong commercial and financial understanding with hands-on technical expertise. You will work closely with Finance, Credit Risk, Operations, Compliance and Technology to ensure our enterprise data warehouse accurately reflects how the business operates.
You will be responsible for developing a single source of truth for operational and financial reporting, enabling confident business decisions through trusted data.
Whilst this is a leadership role, we expect the successful candidate to remain technically involved in architecture, data modelling and implementation.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Data Strategy
Develop and own the company's enterprise data strategy, ensuring data is treated as a strategic business asset.
You will:
- Develop the enterprise data roadmap
- Define long-term data architecture
- Establish enterprise data standards
- Drive data quality across the organisation
- Promote data-driven decision making
- Develop a scalable reporting and analytics capability
Business Partnership
Partner with business leaders to understand how each function operates and translate business processes into scalable data models.
You will work closely with:
- Finance
- Credit Risk
- Operations
- Compliance
- Customer Services
- Marketing
- Technology
to ensure reporting reflects genuine business requirements rather than underlying application structures.
Responsibilities include:
- Understanding business processes end-to-end
- Defining common business terminology
- Eliminating conflicting reports across departments
- Identifying opportunities to automate reporting
- Improving operational insight through better data
- Challenging existing reporting where improvements can be made
Financial Data & Reporting
Work closely with Finance to build an enterprise data model capable of supporting robust financial management.
Responsibilities include:
- Supporting management accounts
- Financial reconciliations
- Revenue reporting
- Customer balance reporting
- Payment and settlement reporting
- Commission reporting
- Profitability analysis
- Forecasting and budgeting support
- Regulatory reporting
The successful candidate will understand how operational data translates into financial information and will ensure the warehouse supports accurate reconciliation between systems.
Enterprise Data Warehouse
Own the design and continual evolution of the company's enterprise data warehouse.
Responsibilities include:
- Dimensional modelling
- Star schema design
- Fact and dimension modelling
- Slowly changing dimensions
- Master data management
- Metadata management
- Semantic layer design
- Data lineage
- Business definitions
- Data quality controls
You will ensure the warehouse becomes the trusted source for all business reporting.
Data Engineering
Remain hands-on with the technical implementation of the data platform.
Responsibilities include:
- Designing ETL and ELT pipelines
- Change Data Capture (CDC)
- AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
- Amazon Redshift optimisation
- SQL performance tuning
- Data pipeline monitoring
- Automation
- Data lifecycle management
AWS Data Platform
Own the organisation's cloud data platform, including:
- Amazon Redshift
- AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
- Amazon S3
- AWS Glue (where appropriate)
Ensure the platform remains secure, scalable and cost-effective.
Skills & Experience
Essential
- Strong financial services experience in an FCA regulated environment
- Significant experience designing enterprise data warehouses
- Strong commercial awareness
- Excellent understanding of financial reporting principles
- Experience partnering with Finance teams
- Strong SQL expertise
- Excellent dimensional modelling skills
- Experience designing star schemas
- Experience building enterprise reporting platforms
- Strong understanding of data governance
- Excellent stakeholder management skills
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences
- Experience working within cloud-based data platforms
The successful candidate will not only be able to make a massive mark on this business, but will also be counted as one of the leaders of this business, working closely with c-suite to shape it for the future.
If you believe you have the skills for this challenging role, please send your up to date CV and availability to discuss.