Head of Data & AI

Salary: £100,000 - 100,000 per year

Requirements:

• Proven hands-on experience building modern cloud data platforms end to end, from ingestion through to analytics and AI consumption, not just overseeing others doing it
• Strong Azure data engineering background, including Data Factory, Synapse and/or Fabric, with solid SQL and pipeline/ETL-ELT fundamentals
• Direct experience implementing medallion or equivalent layered lakehouse architecture
• Comfortable being the most senior technical person in the room while still writing pipelines and making architectural decisions personally
• Some experience leading, mentoring or growing a data engineering team
• Strong stakeholder communication, with confidence communicating with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Production experience specifically in Microsoft Fabric is desirable
• Power BI experience, particularly Direct Lake mode, is desirable
• Python/PySpark experience is desirable
• Data governance or security experience is desirable
• Experience enabling AI/ML workloads from a data platform, not just BI, is desirable

Responsibilities:

• Design and build a modern data platform in Azure Fabric, from ingestion through to a governed lakehouse/warehouse and on to analytics and AI enablement
• Implement medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold) as the core data model
• Set technical direction as the senior technical owner of the data function
• Work closely with the CIO and business stakeholders to translate requirements into a scalable, governed platform
• Enable downstream analytics and AI/ML use cases as the platform matures
• Lead and grow a small data engineering team over time

Technologies:

• AI
• Azure
• Cloud
• ETL
• Fabric
• Power BI
• Python
• PySpark
• SQL
• Security

More:

We are investing in a modern data platform on Microsoft Azure Fabric and need a hands-on leader who wants to stay close to the tooling, designing, building, and writing pipelines personally rather than only directing others. The role reports directly to the CIO and includes an existing data engineer as the first direct report, with scope to grow the team as the platform matures. This is a hybrid role based in Leicester, with 3 days per week onsite, and offers a salary of up to £100,000 plus bonus.

last updated 39 week of 2026