Head of Data Platform Strategy & AI Enablement

Simple Machines 3; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Simple Machines in London seeks a senior data leader to guide the Global Data Practice. You will shape data platform propositions, drive architectural direction, and engage with enterprise clients to modernise data ecosystems for an AI-native future.

The role blends executive and technical leadership, requiring deep cloud-native expertise, data mesh governance, and a vision for distributed data ownership and AI-enabled data platforms across the UK and Europe.

Qualifications

• 10+ years’ experience across data engineering, data platforms, analytics engineering, or data architecture.
• Demonstrated 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.
• Experience developing data products and reusable enterprise data capabilities.
• Deep understanding of data mesh, federated governance, and scalable domain-oriented data ownership.
• Experience designing platforms to support AI-native use cases and ML workflows.
• Strong understanding of real-time and event-driven architectures and streaming data systems.
• Experience building platforms for governed, discoverable data products at scale.
• Familiarity with contemporary data stack technologies and modern engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Part of the Global Data Practice leadership team and shaping data platform propositions.
• Define and evolve data platform direction, technical strategy, and market positioning.
• Advise enterprise clients on data platform strategy, architecture, and AI readiness.
• Support evolution from traditional data platforms toward AI-native, real-time data products.
• Collaborate with Engagement Managers and senior leadership on major initiatives.
• Lead architecture and technical direction for complex data platform programs.
• Act as senior technical counterpart across client engagements and partner relationships.
• Contribute to pre-sales, proposals, and executive stakeholder engagement.

Skills

Data engineering

Data platforms

Analytics engineering

Data architecture

Enterprise consulting

Pre-sales / solution shaping

Cloud-native architectures

Tools

GCP

AWS

Azure

Databricks

Snowflake

Kafka

Spark

dbt

Kubernetes

Airflow

Job description

Simple Machines in London seeks a senior data leader to guide the Global Data Practice. You will shape data platform propositions, drive architectural direction, and engage with enterprise clients to modernise data ecosystems for an AI-native future.

The role blends executive and technical leadership, requiring deep cloud-native expertise, data mesh governance, and a vision for distributed data ownership and AI-enabled data platforms across the UK and Europe.