Head of Data Platform

About Albany Beck Albany Beck is a specialist Financial Services Consultancy helping institutions deliver complex change and transformation while building the internal capability to sustain it. We combine subject matter expertise with innovative delivery models that help clients scale efficiently, while offering meaningful, long-term career opportunities to our people. At Albany Beck, you'll be choosing to work with an organisation that's passionate about your learning journey and committed to your professional and personal development. Summary We are looking for an experienced Head of Data Platform to take ownership of a large-scale enterprise data platform within a highly regulated financial services environment. This is a senior leadership role for someone who can quickly take control of an existing data platform, stabilise delivery and shape the longer-term platform strategy. The successful individual will lead across platform engineering, architecture and delivery, while ensuring the technology supports major transformation programmes, analytics, reporting and future AI use cases. Key responsibilities

• Take leadership and accountability for the enterprise data platform and associated engineering capability.
• Assess the current platform, technical debt, delivery risks, dependencies and capability gaps.
• Own and evolve the strategic roadmap for the data platform.
• Lead Data Engineering, Platform Engineering and associated architecture capability.
• Establish consistent patterns across ingestion, orchestration, transformation, storage, integration and consumption.
• Improve platform reliability, observability, monitoring and operational resilience.
• Strengthen architecture standards, technical controls and route-to-live governance.
• Ensure appropriate security, access control, lineage, metadata and data-quality capabilities are embedded.
• Reduce duplication and fragmentation across the data estate.
• Partner closely with Data Governance, Analytics, Architecture and major programme teams.
• Assess the existing team and determine where capability should be retained, developed or strengthened.
• Establish a sustainable operating model across permanent and flexible capability.
• Provide clear executive-level reporting on platform performance, risk, roadmap and investment priorities. Experience required
• Significant experience leading enterprise Data Platform / Data Engineering functions.
• Senior leadership experience within Wealth Management and/or Financial Services
• Strong experience with Microsoft Azure and Databricks.
• Deep understanding of modern lakehouse and enterprise data platform architecture.
• Strong knowledge of data ingestion, orchestration, transformation and integration.
• Experience leading both transformation delivery and BAU / platform operations.
• Strong understanding of data architecture, metadata, lineage, data quality and governance.
• Experience modernising complex or fragmented legacy data estates.
• Proven leadership of multidisciplinary engineering and architecture teams.
• Strong stakeholder management and the ability to communicate technical strategy to senior business leaders. Desirable
• Wealth Management, Asset Management or Insurance experience.
• Microsoft Fabric / Power BI exposure.
• Experience working through significant M&A or legacy-platform consolidation.
• Experience supporting AI / advanced analytics through modern data platforms.