Head of Data - Payments Fintech

Head of Data | Payment Orchestration Platform | UK We're partnering with a scaling payment orchestration business to appoint a Head of Data, reporting directly to the CEO. It's a chance to build the data function properly, with the backing of an exec team that sees data as a commercial asset. The brief is to take data from "a collection of records" to something the business actually runs on. That means well-governed, trusted data feeding intelligent payment routing, approval rate optimisation and merchant insights, and laying the foundations for future AI-driven services. You'll work closely with the CPO, CTO and CFO, and you'll be the senior authority on data governance, quality and stewardship across the platform. To be clear, this isn't a pure analytics or data science role. A big part of the job is getting the foundations right: a pragmatic governance framework, a clear ownership and stewardship model, measurable data quality standards, and controls that stand up to UK GDPR, ICO and PCI-DSS scrutiny. The commercial upside depends on that work. You'll also build and lead a small specialist team of two to three people, covering governance and compliance plus data engineering and quality. What they're looking for You'll have held a senior data leadership role in payments, fintech or another heavily regulated sector, and you'll have designed and implemented governance and data quality frameworks yourself, not just written the policy. You'll need hands-on experience with UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and PCI-DSS, a solid grasp of lineage, metadata and lifecycle management, and experience in cloud environments. You'll also need to be credible in front of executives, auditors and regulators, and comfortable building a team from a small base. It would help to have a background in orchestration, gateways, acquiring or card processing, experience in FCA-regulated environments, familiarity with ISO 27001 or SOC 2, or time spent building data capability in a scale-up. Package: [Competitive base + bonus/equity, TBC] Location: [TBC / hybrid]