Harnham
Alternative Data Director
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Alternative Data Director
£120,000–£150,000
Fully Remote in The UK
The Company
A fast-growing alternative data business providing investors with daily revenue and KPI intelligence across hundreds of listed companies globally is seeking an Alternative Data Director to lead their “Research” function. The business works with around 100 investment funds, using a combination of first- and third-party data alongside proprietary modelling methodologies to uncover signals and trends ahead of traditional reporting; having recently secured further investment, the business is continuing to scale its data capabilities and is now looking for a senior data leader to build out its Data Research function.
The Role
This is a senior, hands-on leadership role sitting within the Data Research function. You will be responsible for identifying, researching and evaluating new datasets and working out how they can be transformed into valuable commercial intelligence. The role sits closely alongside the Data Partnerships function, which is responsible for sourcing and purchasing new datasets.
Your team will then answer the critical questions:
- What is actually contained within the data?
- Is it reliable and fit for purpose?
- What can we learn from it?
- Can it help us create new KPIs or products?
- Is the data worth the commercial investment?
You will also lead research projects from the other direction; starting with a question or hypothesis around a sector or KPI and determining what data could be used to answer it. This is not a pure people-management position; we are looking for someone who can set the strategy but also get deep into the data, challenge technical work and personally drive complex research projects. The team currently includes a Data Evaluation Manager, with the wider Data Research function expected to grow significantly.
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What You'll Be Doing
- Define and lead the overall Data Research strategy.
- Lead end-to-end research projects, developing hypotheses around new ways to track sectors and KPIs.
- Assess and validate new alternative datasets from Data Partnerships.
- Lead data discovery, including identifying and investigating potential sources independently.
- Apply statistical analysis to determine whether datasets have meaningful relationships with important business metrics.
- Develop and improve standards for evaluating new datasets.
- Work across data validation, modelling, feature engineering and statistical analysis.
- Build robust approaches to assessing messy, real-world data.
- Develop the team's approach to data valuation and cost-benefit analysis.
- Work closely with Data Partnerships to inform purchasing decisions.
- Identify new ways existing datasets can be used to create additional insight or products.
- Set the technical standard for the Data Research team.
- Lead, develop and grow the team as the function scales.
- Work closely with the CTO, Strategy leadership and other senior stakeholders.
- Explore how AI can improve the speed and quality of data research and evaluation.
Your Skills & Experience
You will be a technically strong data leader who enjoys data discovery, research and solving open-ended problems.
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I am particularly interested in people who can demonstrate:
- Extensive experience in Data Science, Statistics or a closely related quantitative discipline.
- Some experience in technical leadership or management.
- Strong hands-on Python experience.
- Strong SQL skills.
- Excellent statistical analysis and data modelling capability.
- Experience working with messy, real-world datasets.
- Strong experience in feature engineering and turning raw/complex data into something commercially useful.
- A track record of discovering, assessing or evaluating new datasets.
- Experience defining hypotheses and taking complex research questions through to an evidence-based conclusion.
- The ability to assess whether data is genuinely fit for purpose.
- Strong commercial judgement around the value and cost of acquiring data.
- The ability to operate as a do-er, rather than purely a strategic leader.
- Experience leading and developing technical data teams.
For this role, experience in alternative data, financial data, investment research, data discovery, consultancy or data-led SaaS environments could all be relevant. Experience with first-party data collection, expert panels, surveys or using AI to improve research workflows would also be advantageous. This role is less suited to purely ML Engineering, BI/dashboarding or traditional Equity Research profiles without substantial hands-on experience working with datasets.
The Benefits
£120,000–£150,000 salary
How to Apply
Please register your interest by sending your CV to Adam Osborne at Harnham via the Apply link on this page
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