Head of Applications & Data

Head of Applications & Data
Coventry | Hybrid, 2 days on site | £70,000 – £80,000 | Permanent
Benefits include a generous holiday allowance plus bank holidays, employer pension contribution, life assurance, an optional healthcare cash plan, 24/7 GP access and employee assistance, retail discounts and cycle to work.

A new leadership role, in a technology function being rebuilt from the ground up.
Our client is a well-known UK organisation serving a large customer base. Technology has sat quietly in the background for years. That's changing: a new technology director is in post, the function has been restructured around build, run and change, and this is the role that owns build.

What you'll own
You take the application estate and the data platform. Three people will report to you.

Day to day that means:

• Core customer-facing and business systems owned as products, with roadmaps and named owners, rather than projects nobody looks after once they go live
• Supplier relationships at roadmap level: influencing what gets built
• A legacy on-prem data warehouse that has to move, and the decision about where it moves to
• A cloud integration landscape currently built and held by third parties, that needs to come under proper ownership

What you'll need
You don't have to be hands-on any more. You do need to be able to hold your own in a technical conversation about:

• Data pipelines and ETL/ELT tooling, such as Azure Data Factory or the equivalent elsewhere
• Integration services, such as Logic Apps or an iPaaS platform
• Event-based messaging, such as Azure Service Bus or a similar queue or event platform
• Modern data platforms, and the trade-offs between something like Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake

The environment is Microsoft-led, so Azure experience is the closest fit, though strong AWS or Google equivalents are worth a conversation.

You'll also need to have led a small team, worked in a multi-site organisation, and be comfortable that budgets here are earned through business cases rather than handed out.

Why it's worth a look
A genuinely blank page. No product management has existed here before, so the structure, the standards and the roadmap are yours to set. Four of the six core systems are prime for a review over the next couple of years. You'll sit on the technology leadership team, which is also the group that makes the architecture calls, so you're in the room for the decisions.