Head of Data (Product & Infrastructure)

💷 Salary: £105,000 DOE + Bonus and Car Allowance

🏢 Work Life Balance: Hybrid, 2 days per week at our Northampton office

✈️ Candidate Journey: Our goal is to reply to applications within 3 working days. Additionally, we make sure to acknowledge, evaluate, and respond to all applications as a way of showing our appreciation for your time and effort in applying to us.

Staysure Group is a leading entity in the insurance sector, distinguished by our decisive and strategic choices that prioritise customer excellence. Our organisation is adept at drawing in industry-leading professionals and providing extensive prospects for personal and professional growth.

With a combination of a skilled workforce and strategic approach, we are confident in our ongoing ability to welcome outstanding professionals to accompany us on our path of continuous growth and achievement.

Our aim is to innovate, dominate and disrupt niche insurance on a global scale, which means we are seeking innovators and individuals who embrace change with ease. Together, we can drive change and make a significant impact in the industry.

🌟 The Role:

This is a senior leadership role responsible for defining and delivering the Group’s data-as-a-product strategy. You will lead the development of core data capabilities, semantic layers, catalogues, lineage and quality standards and own the foundational architecture that supports consumption across brands and domains.

Beyond infrastructure, this role is about unlocking the intelligent use of data. That means not only making data available, but making it usable and ensuring teams across the Group can discover, trust and leverage high-quality data to drive commercial, operational and AI-enabled outcomes. You will play a key role in turning our data estate into a strategic enabler of growth, personalisation, automation, and innovation.

You will work closely with the Head of AI Systems & Enablement to ensure all data infrastructure is AI ready by design and that data scientists can discover, trust, and utilise high quality data products to power machine learning and AI applications. Together, these two roles form the strategic backbone of the Group’s data and intelligence ecosystem.

You will also collaborate with the Head of Data (Integration) to ensure the underlying data platform, architecture, and engineering pipelines meet the needs of scalable, secure and performant data operations. In parallel, you will partner with the Head of BI and Insights to ensure data products are usable, trusted, and discoverable, enabling faster access to insight and reducing duplication across the Group.

🌟 What will you do?

Data product strategy & ownership:

• Define and manage the Group’s data-as-a-product strategy, owning product lifecycles, discoverability, SLAs and usability standards.
• Deliver and evolve the hub-and-spoke data model, enabling brands to self serve high quality data without engineering dependency.
• Implement robust version control, change management and data product ownership models across domains.

Foundational data platform capabilities:

• Oversee the development and scaling of core data infrastructure: 
• Semantic layer
• Data cataloguing
• Metadata and lineage tracking
• Real-time ingestion and transformation
• Role-based access control and permissions
• Partner with InfoSec and Legal to ensure compliance with GDPR, FCA, and Group data governance policies.

AI readiness and Data Science enablement:

• Collaborate with the Head of AI Systems & Enablement to:
• Ensure labelled training datasets, feature stores, and synthetic data are available and well governed.
• Maintain interoperability between data pipelines and ML deployment frameworks.
• Define data access and privacy frameworks that support both experimentation and compliance.
• Support the data science lifecycle by ensuring discoverability, data quality, and schema stability for model training and evaluation.
• Domain stewardship & cultural enablement:
• Embed data product managers and stewards in key business areas to drive domain ownership and accountability.
• Champion a Group-wide shift toward data as an operational asset, not a reporting output.
• Build shared data language, naming conventions, and onboarding resources to reduce duplication and speed up time to insight.

🌟 Essentials:

• Proven leadership in enterprise data product or platform roles, ideally within complex, multi-brand organisations.
• Demonstrated success in building and scaling data-as-a-product operating models. Defining ownership, versioning, SLAs, and discoverability.
• Strong understanding of modern data architectures (e.g. event-driven pipelines, semantic layers, real-time streaming, metadata management). 
• Deep experience in implementing and scaling data governance frameworks, including lineage, quality controls, access management and auditability.
• Familiarity with cloud-native data stacks (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, dbt, Apache Kafka, Fivetran, Airflow)
• Familiarity with enabling AI and data science teams through well-structured, ML/AI ready datasets, feature stores, and pipeline support.
• Solid understanding of GDPR, FCA, and data protection compliance, with experience embedding these controls into platform and product design.
• Track record of cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, AI/ML, BI, legal, finance and operational teams to deliver business value from data.
• Strong stakeholder engagement and communication skills. Able to translate technical constraints into commercial trade-offs and vice versa.
• Comfortable navigating both high level strategy and detailed data architecture discussions with the ability to influence C-level and delivery teams.

🌟 Bonus skills you may pack in your suitcase:

• Experience in insurance, financial services, or other regulated industries with complex data compliance requirements
• Exposure to AI/ML enablement tooling, such as feature stores, data versioning tools (e.g. Feast, MLflow), or synthetic data generation platforms
• Experience working in or alongside data science and MLOps teams
• Knowledge of data mesh or domain-oriented data architectures
• Prior involvement in Group-wide transformation or digital maturity programmes
• Relevant certifications (e.g. DAMA, CDMP, TOGAF, or cloud data architecture credentials)

We’re assembling a diverse team, where skills, not checkboxes, reign supreme, regardless of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. 

Staysure Group welcomes all new starters with open arms, providing training, development opportunities, and great benefits.