TRAKD
Head of Data Engineering
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About the Company
Our client is looking for someone who has built a data platform and a data function before — at Lead or Head of level — and wants to do it again from the ground up, hands-on, from day zero. This is a genuine leadership seat as much as a build: you'll set the multi-year data strategy, present it to the board, and stand up a governance framework that sticks.
About the Role
What you'll own:
- Data strategy: Define and own a multi-year data strategy spanning platform, architecture, data products, catalog, lineage, and governance. Make the build-vs-buy and lake-vs-warehouse-vs-lakehouse calls, justify them, and sequence the roadmap against the wider platform rebuild and M&A pipeline.
- Culture: Move the organisation from report-consumers to a data-driven business, changing how decisions get made and who's accountable for the numbers behind them.
- The platform: Design and build the new platform from scratch — ELT/ingestion, storage and compute layers, transformation, orchestration, and serving.
- Data products: Establish a data-product approach: well-defined, owned, documented, reusable datasets and models that business teams can build on, rather than one-off reports and brittle point-to-point flows.
- Catalog & lineage: Stand up a data catalog and end-to-end lineage so the organisation can find, trust, and trace its data.
- Governance: Design and enforce a governance framework: define data ownership, assign owners at C-suite level, set standards for quality, definitions, and access, and hold owners accountable for their domains.
- Acquisition onboarding: Build the playbook for integrating newly acquired businesses — a repeatable pattern for discovery, mapping, ingestion, and reconciliation — so each acquisition gets faster, not slower.
- The team: Direct the BI developer and cloud engineer supporting you now; from year two, hire and lead the wider data team.
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Responsibilities
- Has built a data platform from scratch before, designed and delivered end to end, at Lead, VP, or Head of Data level.
- Deep, current command of several modern data stacks, and fluent in the tradeoffs between lake, warehouse, lakehouse, and data mesh — not just the vocabulary.
- Strong ELT, transformation, modelling, and orchestration fundamentals; willing and able to do the build personally, with the team coming later.
- Can present a data strategy to a sceptical board or senior stakeholders and make it stick.
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Qualifications
- 10+ years in data, including managing and leading data teams.
- A genuine data-product mindset for how data is built, owned, and consumed.
- Experience onboarding acquisitions or integrating disparate data estates.
- Experience standing up data governance and ownership models that actually held.
- Background in a PE-backed, acquisitive, or fast-moving business.
Required Skills
- A pure strategist or architect who hasn't shipped in years.
- A hands-on engineer without the gravitas to lead senior stakeholders and a board.
- Anyone who needs an existing team and platform to operate.
Preferred Skills
- This role needs both halves: the seniority to set direction and hold senior people accountable, and the hunger to be back in the build from day one.
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