Director of Data Platform & AI Strategy

Ashdown Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 135,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

Ashdown Group, partnering with a leading international data organisation, seeks a Director of Data Engineering to shape and lead its next phase of data platform development. This senior role targets an established Head of Data or Director of Data Engineering who can combine strategic vision with deep technical depth.

You will own the organisation's data architecture, engineering strategy and data platform, ensuring it provides a trusted, scalable foundation for customer-facing products,

Qualifications

• 12+ years in data engineering or related senior leadership roles.
• Experience designing and operating enterprise-scale data platforms.
• Strong cloud data architecture expertise across Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery.

Responsibilities

• Define enterprise data architecture and technical roadmap.
• Lead development of a scalable cloud data platform.
• Own data modelling, governance, quality and resilience.
• Build foundations supporting AI, ML and advanced analytics.
• Establish DataOps, CI/CD, observability and data quality practices.
• Lead and develop a high-performing data engineering function.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Data Science to drive commercial value.
• Own budgets, vendors and cloud cost optimisation.

Skills

Data architecture

Cloud data platforms

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

SQL

Python

Data modelling

DataOps

CI/CD

Observability

Data quality

Leadership

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Job description

Ashdown Group, partnering with a leading international data organisation, seeks a Director of Data Engineering to shape and lead its next phase of data platform development. This senior role targets an established Head of Data or Director of Data Engineering who can combine strategic vision with deep technical depth.

You will own the organisation's data architecture, engineering strategy and data platform, ensuring it provides a trusted, scalable foundation for customer-facing products,