Director, Data Platforms & AI Strategy

Internetwork Expert; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Simple Machines in London seeks a Director of Technology - Data Platforms to lead and shape our data platform strategy across the UK and Europe, blending hands-on engineering with executive leadership. This senior role focuses on defining propositions, guiding architecture and delivery, and helping clients modernise their data ecosystems for an AI-native future.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical depth with commercial insight, able to drive advisory, pre‑sales and cross-functional

Qualifications

• 10+ years’ experience across data engineering, data platforms, analytics engineering, or data architecture.
• Proven consultancy and enterprise client-facing experience.
• Strong pre-sales, proposal development, and solution shaping capability.
• Experience architecting and delivering modern cloud-native data platforms at enterprise scale.
• Deep understanding of data mesh, federated governance, and scalable domain-oriented data ownership.
• Experience with AI-native use cases and real-time data architectures.

Responsibilities

• Be part of the Global Data Practice leadership team.
• Define and evolve data platform propositions, technical direction, and strategic positioning.
• Advise enterprise clients on modern data platform strategy, architecture, operating models, and AI readiness.
• Support organisations as they evolve to AI-native, real-time, data product‑oriented models.
• Work with Engagement Managers and senior leadership on major initiatives.
• Lead architecture and technical direction for complex enterprise data programs.
• Act as senior technical counterpart across client engagements and partner relationships.
• Pre-sales, proposal development, technical solution shaping, and executive stakeholder engagement.
• Build trusted relationships with technology partners and stay current with market direction.
• Support recruitment, mentoring, capability uplift, and practice development.

Skills

Data engineering

Data platforms

Analytics engineering

Data architecture

Consultancy

Pre-sales

Solution shaping

Cloud-native architectures

Data mesh

Federated governance

AI readiness

Real-time streaming

Event-driven architectures

Data products

Platform tooling

GCP

AWS

Azure

Databricks

Snowflake

Kafka

Spark

dbt

Kubernetes

Airflow

ML/AI enablement

Executive leadership

Delivery leadership

Tools

GCP

AWS

Azure

Databricks

Snowflake

Kafka

Spark

dbt

Kubernetes

Airflow

Job description

Simple Machines in London seeks a Director of Technology - Data Platforms to lead and shape our data platform strategy across the UK and Europe, blending hands-on engineering with executive leadership. This senior role focuses on defining propositions, guiding architecture and delivery, and helping clients modernise their data ecosystems for an AI-native future.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical depth with commercial insight, able to drive advisory, pre‑sales and cross-functional