Head of Data & AI

Head of Data & AI

Currently looking for a hands-on, commercially minded Head of Data & AI to lead the data and AI strategy and build a high-performing capability that turns emerging technology into real customer and business value.

This is a senior leadership role with the autonomy to challenge existing thinking, explore new opportunities and take ideas from concept and experimentation through to production at scale. You’ll balance innovation with practical delivery, ensuring data and AI become genuine differentiators across products, services and internal operations.

Work closely with the executive team, Product, Engineering, Architecture and Security, to drive the AI roadmap, priorities and delivery outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and deliver the Data & AI strategy, roadmap and technical direction across the organisation.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI across products, services and internal operations to improve customer value, automation and decision-making.
• Explore and apply emerging technologies including generative AI, LLMs, RAG, Agentic AI, predictive analytics, graph intelligence, recommendation systems and semantic search.
• Turn ideas into prototypes and MVPs, validate them with users and stakeholders, and scale successful solutions into production.
• Own the data platform strategy, ensuring well-governed data underpins AI and analytics initiatives.
• Establish robust MLOps and engineering practices covering deployment, monitoring, experimentation and governance.
• Champion practical AI adoption across Product and Engineering to improve ways of working.
• Build, lead and develop a high-performing Data & AI team.
• Ensure AI innovation is secure, responsible, transparent and appropriate.
• Work with senior leadership to connect technology investment to customer outcomes, commercial priorities and business strategy.

Key Skills: 

• Proven experience delivering production-grade AI and ML solutions, not just experimentation or proof of concepts.
• Strong hands-on experience with generative AI, LLMs and AI application architectures, including RAG, prompt engineering, agents and model evaluation.
• Deep understanding of modern data engineering, data platforms and MLOps.
• Strong cloud experience across Azure with experience building scalable, cloud-native solutions.
• Strong software engineering and architecture fundamentals, with the credibility to engage deeply with senior technical teams.
• A track record of introducing innovative or disruptive technologies into established organisations and turning ideas into measurable outcomes.
• Strong commercial judgement and the ability to translate complex technology into clear customer and business value.
• Proven experience building, leading and developing high-performing technical teams.