Technical Platform Owner - EDPS

Elsevier; London; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job description

About Us

A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world’s grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.

The Team

The Enterprise Data Platforms and Services (EDPS) team are a central technology group responsible for building, administering, governing, and setting global standards for a growing number of Elsevier strategic data platforms and services. The capabilities we are responsible for enable data to be collected, accessed, processed and integrated across a wide range of digital business solutions, used by functions including sales, marketing, finance, e-commerce, billing and order management, customer and product master data management, and business analytics and insights delivery. Due to our footprint across the enterprise, we are relied upon to ensure our systems are trusted, reliable and available. The technologies underpinning these capabilities includes industry leading data and analytics products such as Snowflake, Tableau, DBT, Talend, Collibra, Kafka/Confluent, Astronomer/Airflow, and Kubernetes.

This forms part of a longer-term strategic direction to implement Data Mesh, and with it establish shared platforms that enables a connected collection of enterprise-ready time saving services, applying a self-service first approach. Our mission is to enable frictionless experiences for all Elsevier colleagues, so that they can openly and securely consume and produce trustworthy data, enhancing everyday colleague and customer interactions and decisions.

The Role

As the Technical Platform Owner, you will sit at the intersection of technology and business, managing the end-to-end lifecycle of a data platform self-service capabilities while leading and collaborating with engineering, architecture, data science, analytics, and business teams. Your work will shape how our organisation leverages data to drive innovation, operational efficiencies and decision-making.

In this high-profile role you will understand user requirements and map diverse user interactions with the various data platform components to inform our design and implementation decisions. You will be expected to build stakeholder relationships with business colleagues at all levels to ensure that the platform is meeting key business objectives. You will champion the use of our shared services and common platforms, demonstrating how these effectively support the organisations data maturity and data-as-a-product thinking, for improved outcomes.

To do so effectively, you will work closely with technology squads, product managers, data product owners, delivery managers, and enablement teams to plan the roadmap, capture value and track business outcomes. Given the various Elsevier platform initiatives, you will be accountable for ensuring that there is a cohesive approach to the capabilities we build. To achieve this, you may create appropriate technical communities of practice and chapters, promoting collaboration, with the goal of driving alignment to maximise value realisation. Over time, you will also be expected to represent the EDPS group in various business forums to ensure we are informed and consulted on various data initiatives and programmes.

Your success will be measured by demonstrable improvements in technical efficiency gains, increased business adoption, and broadened re-use of the services we provision.

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities

• Accountable for cross-domain roadmap – collaborate and partner with key stakeholders, to define the roadmap and dependencies for a modern data platform, and guide the architectural evolution to ensure it meets organisational goals and objectives.
• Accountable for platform backlog – curate a robust, prioritised and development-ready backlog ensuring user needs and requirements are accurately reflected and captured.
• Accountable for reusable patterns – establish common frameworks and patterns that can be easily reused and deployed in a self-service and frictionless manner.
• Accountable for operational efficiency – develop and track success metrics, own action plans for continuous improvement, and oversee their execution to continually enhance the platform’s efficiency, reliability, and value delivery over time.
• Accountable for platform adoption – promote the platform across Elsevier, through well documented processes, knowledge sharing, internal guides, and communities of practice.
• Responsible for platform ways-of-working – evolve the platform interaction model towards a data mesh paradigm for improved inner-sourced capabilities and federated model.
• Responsible for technical governance – work with enterprise governance groups to drive standards and policies adoption, and develop new ones where appropriate.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Product ownership – deep experience in partnering and collaborating with senior stakeholders and technology consumer groups to build and own a holistic data platform roadmap, setting platforms success criteria, and owning achievements against these.
• Data platform topologies – broad knowledge designing and leading the strategic and conceptual evolution of data engineering and analytics self-service capabilities (extraction, storage, transformation, analysis, data quality, etc), with an eye to how AI augment these.
• Cloud technologies – working knowledge of AWS services and architectures, having previously deployed and owned composable data platforms, combining a mixture of SaaS, PaaS and serverless technologies to achieve a coherent and decoupled set of capabilities.
• Value driven leadership – proven ability to drive business outcomes (e.g time savings, cost savings, and revenue generation) and aptitude to think strategically about data initiatives.
• Design thinking – applied methodologies, tools, and techniques that assist in ideating and prototyping solutions to validate hypothesis to various problem statements and use cases.
• Stakeholder management – partnering and collaborating with senior stakeholders to resolve issues, with minimal guidance, to promote transparency and build trust.
• Agile delivery and prioritisation – adaptable to changing/competing needs with a professional, flexible and pragmatic response to rapidly evolving priorities, while mitigating impacts.
• Consulting, influencing and championing – creating proposals for change, through effective collaboration, communication, facilitation, storytelling, and change management.
• Data and technology governance – application of data management, data privacy and security approaches to ensure compliant use of platform capabilities.

Work in a way that works for you

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. With an average length of service of 9 years, we are confident that we offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and long-term goals.

• Working remotely from home or in our office in a flexible hybrid style
• Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive

Working with us

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to help you succeed. Here, you will find an inclusive, agile, collaborative, innovative and fun environment, where everyone has a part to play. Regardless of the team you join, we promote a diverse environment with co-workers who are passionate about what they do, and how they do it.

Working for you

At Elsevier, we know that your wellbeing and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:

• Generous holiday allowance with the option to buy additional days
• Access to learning platforms and encouragement to book up to 10 days focused learning/development time per year
• Health screening, eye care vouchers and private medical benefits
• Wellbeing programs
• Life assurance
• Access to a competitive contributory pension scheme
• Long service awards
• Save As You Earn share option scheme
• Travel Season ticket loan
• Maternity, paternity and shared parental leave
• Access to emergency care for both the elderly and children
• RELX Cares days, giving you time to support the charities and causes that matter to you
• Access to employee resource groups with dedicated time to volunteer
• Access to extensive learning and development resources
• Access to employee discounts via Perks at Work

Join Us

Purposeful Work
When you work with us, your work matters. You are part of an organisation that nurtures your curiosity to stimulate innovation for the communities that we serve.

Growing Every Day
Like the communities we serve, you are on a constant path of discovery to shape your career and personal development.

Colleagues Who Care
You will be part of the Elsevier family. We will support your well-being and provide the flexibility you need to thrive at work and home.

Together, we create possibilities.
Join us