Staff Product Manager - Data Platforms - 12 month FTC

OVO; West of England; On-site; GBP 82,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

34 days holiday

Healthcare

Private medical

Flex Pay

Pension top-up

Job summary

Staff Product Manager at OVO leads the Data Platform strategy, governance, and tooling to enable trusted, AI-ready data across operational and analytical products. You’ll align data sources, retire duplication, and drive adoption with engineering and analytics teams while prioritising cost and trust at scale.

The role requires strategic insight, technical fluency, and strong stakeholder influence to deliver data products that power OVO’s Plan Zero ambitions.

Qualifications

• Expert in data platforms, governance, and data products.
• Experience leading data, API or platform products for technical teams.
• Strong collaboration with data engineering, analytics, and product partners.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the platform strategy across ingestion, governance, and self-serve discovery.
• Prioritize roadmap using usage and cost data.
• Lead governance by design, including data classification and access controls.
• Influence senior stakeholders and champion platform adoption.

Skills

Systems thinking

Analytical rigour

Stakeholder influence

Job description

Role OVO-View

Team: Data Platforms

Salary banding: £82,000 - £100,000

Contract type: 12 month Fixed-Term Contract

Experience: Expert

Working pattern: Full-Time

Reporting to: Delivery & Growth Lead

Sponsorship: Unfortunately we are unable to offer sponsorship for this role.

This role in 3 words: Enablement, Governance, Impact

Top 3 qualities for this role: Systems thinking, Analytical rigour, Stakeholder influence

Where you’ll work:

Depending on the needs of your business area, we expect hub based people to be in the office at least once a week, and to go to OVO Connection events in-person.

You’ll be assigned to the closest one of our three hub offices, Bristol, Glasgow, or London; unless your role requires field-based work. Each hub has accessible spaces to park your laptop, is designed to inspire people, help them connect and bring big ideas to life.

Everyone belongs at OVO:

At OVO, we are on a mission to solve one of humanity's biggest challenges, the climate crisis. And we know it takes all of us to change the world. That's why we need diverse people from all abilities, gender identities, ethnicities, ages, sexual orientations, life experiences and backgrounds to join us.

Teamworking for the planet:

Everything we do here spins around Plan Zero. So, naturally, the team you’ll be joining plays a gigantic role in making that happen. Here’s how:

The Data Platform team builds the "golden path" for data at OVO: the ingestion, publishing, governance, and self-serve tooling that turns raw operational data into trusted, AI-ready data products served both as operational APIs and as analytical data products in BigQuery. Today OVO's data estate is high-cost and low-trust: business logic is copy-pasted rather than governed, the same metric is defined differently by different teams, and people spend more time finding and cleaning data than using it. This team is changing that by moving OVO to a governed data ecosystem where every team, and every AI agent, can find data, trust it, and build on it, whether they need it in real time or for analysis. Get this right and every downstream decision, model, and customer conversation rests on data people can rely on.

This role in a nutshell:

As a Staff Product Manager at OVO, you'll lead the product vision and strategy for the Data Platform: the tooling and governance that make OVO's data trusted, discoverable, and easy to reuse across both operational APIs and analytical data products served through BigQuery. The platform is the enabler for data simplification across OVO: establishing clear sources of truth for our core business entities, retiring duplicated pipelines, tables, and APIs, and making data ownership explicit. You'll own a portfolio spanning three capability areas: a golden-path platform foundation, trust and governance at scale, and self-serve discovery so teams find and reuse trusted data rather than rebuilding it. You'll bring data engineering, API and platform engineering, data science, analytics, and data-producing teams together, and use evidence (usage analytics, cost data, and user research) to prioritise the work that raises trust, cuts cost, and cuts duplication. We are looking for a blend of strategic insight, technical fluency, and stakeholder influence to set product direction grounded in real signals and in OVO's business strategy.

Governed, deduplicated data is also what makes OVO's AI ambitions credible, so an understanding of how AI and ML solutions consume and depend on well-governed data is valuable.

Your key outcomes will be:

• Governed, trusted, AI ready data at scale: Raise the share of well-governed datasets and the level of trust teams place in OVO's data sources and ensure data is classified and access-controlled so it can be relied on by people and served safely to AI and ML workloads.
• Self-serve by default: Enable every team to publish, discover, and consume trusted data products without engineering bottlenecks, whether through governed APIs or analytical data products, supported by Data Platform capabilities to ingest, transform and publish data products.
• Data simplification and sources of truth: Partner with OVO’s Data Architect to establish clear sources of truth for OVO's core entities, eliminate duplicated pipelines, tables, and APIs, and make data ownership explicit, reducing cost-to-serve and the risk of decisions built on the wrong copy of the data.
• Cost and performance: Give the business real-time visibility of platform performance and spend, and drive down platform cost including BigQuery capacity waste.

Key Responsibilities:

• Shape and deliver Platform strategy: Define and drive a clear product strategy across the platform's pillars (ingestion and transformation, trust and governance, self-serve marketplace, and AI enablement ) spanning both the API and analytical layers, and keeping it aligned with OVO's business goals and grounded in what data producers and consumers actually need.
• Measure and prove Platform impact: Use usage analytics, cost data, and user research to surface insight, prioritise the roadmap, and measure success against the KPIs that reflect genuinely more trusted, cheaper, and more usable data.
• Lead governance and compliance by design: Own the mechanisms that keep OVO's data trustworthy (i.e. classification, access control, retention tooling) and make compliance with Ofgem's data best practice and OVO's data-protection obligations guardrails built into the platform rather than a manual overhead.
• Enable Data Simplification: Support the work to establish sources of truth and retire duplication across OVO's data estate, influencing decentralised data owners to adopt shared standards, recognising that the hard part is organisational, not just technical.
• Drive adoption and growth: Treat the platform as a product with customers you have to win. Actively promote it, onboard teams, strip out barriers to use, and grow adoption of the golden path until it's the default way OVO builds and consumes data. Measure success by teams actively using the platform, not features shipped. This role owns getting the platform used, not just built.
• Engage and influence stakeholders: Build strong relationships with senior leaders and data owners across OVO, presenting strategic recommendations and securing alignment on product direction and investment.
• Champion Platform product management: Help Product Managers across OVO grow their craft in platform and data product management sharing what good looks like, coaching on the specifics of building products for internal and technical customers, and enriching our Community of Practice as it develops this capability.

You’ll be successful in this role if you…

• Built products for technical customers: A track record leading data, API, or platform products where your users are other engineering, data, and analytics teams. You understand what it takes to make an internal platform something people choose to use, not something they're told to.
• Fluency across the API and analytical stack: Enough technical depth to lead credibly across both of the platform's access paths (API design and management, event streaming, BigQuery, Dataform, Looker, and cataloguing tools) making sound trade-offs and earning engineers' trust without needing to be an engineer yourself.
• A grasp of data governance and simplification: Real understanding of data classification, access control, retention, cataloguing, and consistent metric definitions — and why establishing sources of truth and retiring duplication is as much an organisational challenge as a technical one.
• A bias for adoption: Evidence that you get platforms and products actually used, actively promoting them, onboarding teams, and removing friction, and that you measure yourself on usage and outcomes, not features shipped.
• The influence to move decentralised teams. A history of bringing data owners and senior stakeholders onto shared standards when you don't own their roadmaps, using clarity, evidence, and relationships rather than authority.
• Evidence-led instincts: Comfort using usage analytics, cost data, and user research to prioritise the roadmap, prove impact, and connect platform investment to OVO's cost-to-serve and commercial goals.

Let’s talk about what’s in it for you:

We’ll pay you between £82,000 and £100,000, depending on your specific skills and experience.

We keep our pay ranges broad on purpose to give us, and you, flexibility to match your experience to our zero carbon mission.

You’ll be eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%. We have one OVO bonus plan that focuses on the collective performance of our people to deliver our Plan Zero goal.

We also offer plenty of green benefits and progressive policies to help you feel like you belong at OVO…and there’s flex pay. We'll give you 9% Flex Pay on top of your salary – 4% of this is auto enrolled into your pension, and the remaining 5% is yours to do what you like with. You can use this to buy from our extensive range of flexible benefits, including our green benefits which we've put at the heart of our offering, add to your pension or even take it as cash.

Here’s a taster of what’s on offer:

• For starters, you'll get 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays).
• For your health - With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more.
• For your wellbeing - With gym membership, travel insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, dental insurance, and more.
• For your lifestyle - With extra holiday buying, discount dining, home & tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations.
• For your home - Get up to £400 towards any OVO Energy plan, plus great discounts on solar, smart thermostats and EV chargers.
• For your commute - Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans.
• Want to hear about our full range of flexible benefits and progressive people policies? Our People Team can tell you everything you need to know.

For your Belonging

To find better ways to support our people, we need to listen to each other’s experiences and find ways to build a truly inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of this, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO. Led by our people, for our people - so when you join OVO, you can play a part - big or small - with any of the Networks. It's up to you.

Oh, and one last thing...

We’d be thrilled if you tick off all our boxes, yet we also believe it’s just as important we tick off all of yours. And if you think you have most of what we’re looking for but not every single thing, go ahead and hit apply. We’d still love to hear from you!