Our client is a specialist financial services organisation - small by design, deliberate in how it operates. The technology function is lean, and this role carries real breadth as a result. If you are looking for a large team to manage or a narrow remit to optimise, this is not that. If you want genuine ownership of a data platform from the ground up, in an environment where governance is taken seriously and your work has visible organisational impact, it may be exactly right.
The Role
You will be the most senior technology professional responsible for data infrastructure within the organisation. That means owning the architecture, overseeing operations, driving adoption of data capabilities across the business, and keeping the whole thing running to a standard that holds up under regulatory scrutiny.
The role has a dual character: part builder, part operator. There is architectural work to be done — defining how data moves, how it is governed, and how it serves analytics and AI use cases — and there is ongoing operational responsibility for keeping that infrastructure reliable and audit-ready.
What You Will Be Doing
- Taking ownership of the organisation's data platform strategy - how enterprise data is structured, integrated, and made available for downstream consumption
- Designing the governance layer: how data is classified, who owns it, how quality is assured, and how its movement can be traced and evidenced
- Enabling analytics and AI use cases by building out a governed, accessible data foundation - one that business users can work with without needing to go through IT for every query
- Running platform operations day-to-day: availability, incident response, reconciliation between systems, and continuous improvement of service delivery
- Keeping the organisation's disaster recovery posture for data systems current, tested, and documented
- Managing a small internal team and a set of external delivery partners - holding vendors accountable, ensuring skills transfer inward, and maintaining realistic SLAs
- Supporting the broader technology leadership on budget, contract management, and audit coordination
- Playing an active role in cybersecurity response and business continuity planning as a senior member of the technology function
What You Will Bring
- Substantial experience in data infrastructure, data engineering, or analytics platform roles - accumulated across environments where governance and compliance were not optional
- Fluency with at least one major cloud-native data platform and the pipeline patterns that sit around it; experience across more than one is an advantage
- A track record of building governance frameworks that work in practice, not just on paper - covering data quality, access control, and audit traceability
- Experience managing both project delivery and ongoing operations, ideally within or alongside a regulated industry
- Vendor and stakeholder management capability - you are comfortable holding external partners to account and translating technical realities into business language
- Enough breadth to span architecture, delivery, and operations without needing a specialist for each
A Note on Fit
The scope here is wide and the team is small. There is no dedicated governance analyst, no separate infrastructure ops team, no large project management office. What there is, is meaningful work, direct access to leadership, and the ability to shape something that matters. Candidates who have operated in similarly compact environments - or who are deliberately stepping out of larger organisations to find that kind of ownership - will feel at home here.
