Head of Data Migration

Plotbox; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

PlotBox is seeking a Head of Data Migration to own and scale our data migration function. You’ll lead the team, set engineering standards, and drive predictable, reusable migration processes across the business.

You’ll balance strong people leadership with technical credibility, improve delivery metrics, and partner with Sales, Customer Success, Finance and senior leaders to ensure on-time customer go-lives. This is a high-impact leadership role in the UK.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading a technical team with accountability for performance and delivery.
• Strong people leadership with clear expectations, accountability and proactive performance management.
• Experience improving data migration/engineering toward reusable, scalable tooling.
• Ability to establish and use meaningful delivery/quality metrics for transparency and outcomes.
• Strong commercial awareness and understanding of impact on customers, revenue and business.
• Experience leading change in a technical environment and managing resistance to change.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end data migration delivery pipeline from prerequisites to go-live and hypercare, with clear ownership at every stage.
• Own migration schedules and commitments, ensuring realistic timelines and proactive risk communication.
• Establish meaningful migration performance metrics and reporting to measure duration, throughput, quality and predictability.
• Improve instrumentation and data tracking to support decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Drive improvements in first-pass data quality to reduce customer acceptance cycles and speed migrations.
• Identify and remove bottlenecks across the migration lifecycle to increase team effectiveness.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership, review and contribute to migration code, and set engineering standards and best practices.
• Develop reusable and scalable migration approaches, reducing bespoke work and improving maintainability.
• Lead and develop the Data Migration Team with coaching, expectations and ownership of delivery and performance.
• Represent Data Migration across the business, aligning with Sales, CS, Finance and Leadership.

Skills

Technical leadership

People leadership

Data migration

Delivery metrics

Commercial awareness

Change management

Tools

SQL

Python

Microsoft SQL Server

MySQL

Job description

At PlotBox, data migration is a critical part of bringing our customers successfully onto our platform. We’re looking for an experienced Head of Data Migration to take full ownership of this function - leading the team, improving how we deliver, and building a migration capability that is scalable, predictable and trusted across the business.

This is much more than a technical leadership role.

You’ll be accountable for the people, performance and delivery of the Data Migration function, ensuring customers move successfully from their existing systems into PlotBox and that migration commitments can be relied upon by teams across the business.

Our Data teams focus is on increasing throughput, improving predictability and moving further away from bespoke customer-by-customer migrations towards reusable, scalable migration approaches.

We need someone who can lead that next stage.

You’ll combine strong people leadership, technical credibility and commercial awareness. You’ll create accountability, develop the capability of the team, challenge existing ways of working and use meaningful data to understand where delivery can be improved.

You’ll also be comfortable getting close to the technology. While your primary responsibility is leading the function, you'll have sufficient technical depth to review and challenge migration approaches, contribute to technical decisions and establish strong engineering standards.

What You’ll Do

• Own the end-to-end data migration delivery pipeline, from prerequisites and migration through Data Acceptance Testing, go-live and hypercare, ensuring clear ownership and accountability at every stage.
• Own migration schedules and delivery commitments, ensuring timelines are realistic, dependencies are understood and risks or delays are identified and communicated early and clearly to relevant internal teams and external stakeholders.
• Establish meaningful migration performance metrics and reporting, creating reliable measures for migration duration, throughput, quality and predictability to provide clear visibility of the team’s performance and contribution to customer go-live.
• Improve the instrumentation and tracking of migration work, ensuring accurate and consistent data is captured across tools and processes to support operational decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Drive improvements in first-pass data quality, reducing the number of customer acceptance cycles required and improving the predictability and speed of migrations through Data Acceptance Testing.
• Identify and remove bottlenecks across the migration lifecycle, using delivery and quality data to improve processes, reduce delays and increase overall team effectiveness.
• Provide hands‑on technical leadership to the Data Migration team, reviewing and contributing to migration code, making technical and design decisions, and establishing engineering standards and best practices.
• Drive the development of reusable and scalable migration approaches, reducing unnecessary bespoke work and improving the efficiency, consistency and maintainability of migrations. Ensuring that migration playbooks are consistently followed to give the best outcomes for PlotBox and its customers.
• Lead and develop the Data Migration Team, providing clear expectations, coaching and support to enable them to take increasing ownership of day‑to‑day delivery, team performance and people leadership.
• Hold overall accountability for the performance and effectiveness of the Data Migration team, working through the Team Leads to build a high‑performing, accountable and continuously improving team.
• Represent Data Migration across the wider business, partnering effectively with Sales, Customer Success, Finance, Operations and senior leadership to manage dependencies and ensure alignment on priorities and customer commitments.
• Provide clear and credible delivery commitments to stakeholders, proactively communicating risks, changes and potential delays and ensuring there are no surprises around customer delivery.

Essential

What we’re looking for

• Proven experience leading a technical team, with overall accountability for performance, delivery and the effectiveness of the wider function.
• Strong and demonstrable people leadership capability, with experience setting clear expectations, creating accountability and addressing performance issues early, constructively and decisively.
• Experience improving data migration, data engineering or comparable technical delivery, including moving from bespoke, customer‑specific approaches towards reusable, scalable or productised tooling.
• Experience establishing and using meaningful delivery and quality metrics to create transparency, identify bottlenecks and hold teams accountable for measurable outcomes.
• Strong commercial awareness and an understanding of how technical delivery commitments affect customers, revenue and wider business performance.
• Demonstrable experience leading change within a technical environment, including challenging established ways of working and successfully managing resistance to change.

Desirable

• Experience leading a data migration, conversion or data engineering function of a similar size and structure.
• Experience migrating regulated, statutory, sensitive or long‑lived data where accuracy and integrity are critical.
• Experience within SaaS, local government, deathcare or another records‑intensive/customer implementation environment.
• Strong hands‑on SQL capability, with experience working across relational databases. Microsoft SQL Server and/or MySQL experience would be advantageous.
• Practical Python experience within a data engineering, migration or ETL environment, with sufficient technical depth to review, challenge and contribute to migration code.

Why PlotBox?

PlotBox is a global technology business transforming the way deathcare organisations manage their operations and serve their communities.

Our technology supports organisations responsible for some of society’s most important and long‑lived records, which means the quality, integrity and successful migration of customer data really matters.

This role offers the opportunity to take ownership of an established technical function at an important stage of its development. You’ll have the scope to shape how the team operates, develop its people, improve its technology and create a migration capability that can scale with the business.

If you’re a technical leader who enjoys building high‑performing teams, creating accountability and turning complex delivery into something predictable and scalable, we’d love to hear from you.