Engineering Director (data & Ml)

Who we’re looking for We are looking for a Director, Data & ML Engineering to join our team of Data, Analytics and ML Engineers to transform our infrastructure, tools, platforms whilst building a culture that enables business value and growth. 

The ideal candidate knows how to take vague problems and identify concrete solutions, can tie abstract concepts to business issues, and can convert technical debt into strategic opportunities. You will work closely with leaders across Product, Analytics, Commercial, and Marketing to support and implement high-quality, data-driven decisions. 

You’ll build on your previous experiences of establishing and building strategy to enable the next phase of our transformation. You’ll be able to help us build scalable, reliable infrastructure and data architecture, scale up our alerting and observability frameworks, and establish business processes to prevent quality issues. 

You will understand how data is improving the efficiency of everyone in the business to make more informed decisions. How data is re-shaping the interactions brands can have with their customers, how it can unlock the potential of data to signal, AI to inspire, and unmet needs to be met in emerging product propositions.  You will have experience building and running enterprise platforms in a product oriented way.

The team You will be part of the Technology leadership team working closely with fellow Engineering, Product and Business leaders in other domains. Given the broad reach of data across the whole organisation, your network will also incorporate the broader Senior Leadership Team across the business.

You will be accountable for managing, coaching and supporting two teams of Data / Analytics Engineers and ML Engineers. Who maintain and grow our data platform and our ML operations.

Impact and Contributions:

• Storio Group sees the Data platform as a significant driver of competitive advantage. We are embarking on an acceleration initiative to improve the underlying technology as we move out of our integration phase and into growth. We are currently defining our next phase of the Storio group Strategy (as we near the end of an integration/migration chapter post-merger, 2 years ago). We are now defining how we transition to growth - with ambitions that this can be to double-digit.
• We believe data, AI and ML should be front and centre of that vision - a key enabler for competitive advantage. The current state of our platform is not where it needs to be after multiple years of migrations. You will need to be comfortable balancing the competing needs of debt removal building towards our goal of the fast flow of value creation.
• We will also need to create a platform which empowers the needs of our ML team to build, test, run and improve our models. Leveraging the rich set of customer data to enable joy for our customers.
• Finally all of these changes will need to be supported by a strong approach to governance and you will need to be comfortable supporting and enabling these processes.

Experience and Attributes you will need:

• Worked on both Strategy and Delivery of a data platform.
• Lead the strategy and execution of a data platform supporting self serve consumption and automation data products.
• Proven ability to balance the speed of delivery with the right long term technical solution, ensuring the platform is maintainable, scalable and secure.
• Ability to agree clear goals for the teams to deliver on the strategy.
• Experience managing managers of teams to successful delivery and measuring & managing team performance.
• Experience creating and managing governance through defined frameworks.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Demonstrable experience of working with stakeholders across the business to understand and help define their key priorities for data products.
• Comfortable and diplomatic enough to push back to keep focus on agreed goals.
• Is a great communicator, and can socialise the why, as well as the how, and when for the delivery.

Technical Experience

• Demonstrable experience across the data platform domain including: data platform ML Ops, technical architecture, business metric definition, modelling, and reporting.
• Experience working on big data systems with billions of rows of data.
• Has worked, understands and can recommend the different approaches to large scale data processing.