Director of Data

Contract Director of Data

Day rate: £1000-£1500 (Outside IR35)

Duration: 6 months

Hybrid in London (2-3 days/week)

A well-established UK retail and consumer business is looking for an interim data leader to bring order and direction to its data and ai function.

The environment is complex: a sprawling, legacy systems estate, patchy integration, and lineage that’s hard to trust. The business wants someone who can stabilise the function, bring a clear point of view, and start driving change immediately, not just hold things steady.

You’ll operationalise new data standards and lineage practices across the estate, reduce fragility in how systems connect and route data, and build the kind of lineage the business can genuinely rely on. You’ll own delivery of a CDP-style capability that unifies customer and commercial data alongside finance reporting, while still supporting a business that wants to keep growing.

Databricks is the platform standard. You’ll need real experience with lineage tooling, CDP concepts, and finance data integration, plus hands-on AI and ML exposure that goes beyond “we use a chatbot.” Multi-system integration experience matters here: think materialised views, data bus routing, real-time versus batch trade-offs, and the judgement calls behind them. This isn’t a greenfield brief. It rewards people who’ve genuinely modernised a messy, legacy, enterprise-scale estate and can talk about the specific decisions they made, not just that they “led,” “governed” or “advised.”

As Director of Data you’ll represent data at board level, translating technical reality into a story leadership and stakeholders can get behind. You’ll inherit and develop a small, evolving data team, and manage senior stakeholders directly, including some regular and demanding requests.

As Director of Data you’ll enjoy this if you:

• Have hands-on experience untangling a messy, legacy, multi-system data estate

• Can describe the specific technical decisions you made, not just the team you led

• Are comfortable telling a data story at board level as well as building it

• See AI as something you build with, not something you talk about

• Like the ambiguity of an interim brief with room to make a real call

If it sounds like your kind of problem, message me directly for an informal and confidential conversation.

Director of Data

Day rate: £1000-£1500 (Outside IR35)

Duration: 6 months

Hybrid in London (2-3 days/week)