Job Title: Head of Data Migration

Role Location: Hybrid (Wilmslow)

Citation Group is a collective of businesses dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized enterprises across a range of essential services. We know that running a business means juggling a lot, from keeping customers happy and staying compliant, to building strong teams and growing sustainably. Our mission is to ease these pressures by providing expertise, guidance, and solutions that enable business leaders to focus on strategic success. From HR and Health & Safety to Cybersecurity, E-Learning, and ISO compliance, we’ve got you covered.

Citation has achieved strong growth through a combination of organic expansion and strategic acquisitions, continually broadening our expertise, services, and reach to create a one-stop shop that supports businesses across the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Role Purpose

Data migration is the critical path on almost every integration and platform consolidation we run. The engineering rarely fails. What fails is finding data quality problems too late to remediate them, business stakeholders not understanding how their data will land in the new system, and UAT that doesn't genuinely test the migration before go-live.

This role owns data migration end to end — not as a series of one-off projects, but as a permanent discipline. You will turn migration from the thing that blocks our programmes into something we do predictably, repeatably and well. You'll start hands-on, directing engineers across programmes, and build a dedicated migration capability, playbook, and team behind you.

Why this role exists

We move data between systems constantly, and we will only do more of it. Today, migration risk is rediscovered programme by programme: quality issues surface during cutover rather than discovery, stakeholders meet their migrated data for the first time in production, and test plans check that records moved rather than that the business can operate on them. We need a single owner who closes those gaps by design, every time, and leaves a reusable playbook in their wake.

Scope

• Operates across the portfolio — multiple brands, multiple geographies, and successive platform consolidations and acquisitions.
• Initially a player-coach: personally leads migrations and directs programme and squad engineers.
• Builds a dedicated migration function and team over time.
• Owns the migration workstream from discovery through cutover and post-go-live reconciliation on each programme, and owns the migration methodology across all of them.

Key Accountabilities

• Own the migration approach. Define and own the end-to-end methodology — discovery, profiling, mapping, build, reconciliation, cutover, and fallback — and codify it into a playbook that every programme follows. Set the standards, tooling, and patterns so each migration starts from a known position rather than a blank page.
• Find data quality issues early. Lead a structured data discovery and profiling phase at the front of every migration. Surface quality, completeness, and integrity problems while there is still time to remediate them, quantify the remediation effort, and drive the cleanup with data owners before it becomes a cutover crisis.
• Own source to target mappings. Own the source-to-target mapping and system compatibility analysis. Go beyond field-level mapping to build a genuine understanding of how the source and target systems each model, validate, and process data — their rules, constraints, and structural differences. Identify and document conceptual mismatches between the two platforms during discovery, so that behavioural gaps are design decisions made in advance rather than defects discovered in test.
• Own the environments. Ensure we have appropriate environments to be able to stage and test data migrations.
• Set the business up to test. Make sure stakeholders understand how their data will migrate, in their language, before it happens. Design UAT so it tests the business outcome and not just the record count — representative data, reconciled balances, realistic scenarios, clear test scripts, and expected downstream behaviour — so sign-off is meaningful and defects are caught before go-live.
• Lead delivery. Own the migration as a workstream on each programme: plan, sequence, direct the engineers building the transformations, run rehearsals and cutover, manage reconciliation and fallback. Stay close enough to the data to challenge the build, spot anomalies, and make the call when something looks wrong.
• Build the capability. Stand up the playbook, tooling, reusable assets, and standards that make migration repeatable. Grow and lead a migration team as volume justifies it, and raise the wider organisation's data-quality and migration literacy.