Head of Data.

Head of Data

Permanent role

Up to £100k per annum

London (Hybrid)

This organisation is a leading advertising and media specialist, dedicated to unlocking the full potential of out of home (OOH) advertising. With a global presence and a team of over 400 professionals, it provides intelligent, creative, and technology-led OOH solutions for brands. Its mission is to make OOH more effective, measurable, and sustainable, combining data, insight, and innovation to deliver impactful campaigns and measurable outcomes for clients.

The Head of Data is a strategic leader responsible for defining and delivering the data strategy for the organisation. This role ensures that data capabilities directly support commercial and growth objectives, providing the insight and governance needed to enable informed decision-making and create long-term value.

The position unifies fragmented sources, builds trusted, decision-ready data products, and sets the roadmap for how data underpins planning, trading, finance, and client outcomes. In addition to leading a multi-disciplinary team, the Head of Data remains hands-on in data science to accelerate delivery and demonstrate what is possible.

Key Responsibilities

• Data Strategy & Roadmap: Define the target architecture, data products, and governance framework that enable strategic commercial goals across planning, trading, finance, and client delivery.
• Audience Data Leadership: Govern the sourcing, contracting, integration, and application of audience data; develop a robust, privacy-safe methodology for matching audiences to inventory with POI context; standardise segments and measurement frameworks to drive competitive differentiation and client value.
• Platform Configuration Data: Own schemas, reference data, mappings, and feature flags for internal platforms; implement change control, lineage, SLAs, data contracts, and observability to ensure platforms remain commercially effective and scalable.
• Hands-On Data Science: Allocate time to model prototyping (forecasting, optimisation, reach/footfall/brand-lift), method validation, and mentoring, focusing on applications that support commercial planning and growth.
• Leadership & Collaboration: Set standards for engineering, BI, and analytics; work closely with Finance, Commercial, Planning, and Legal/Privacy teams to deliver measurable impact while maintaining compliance and auditability.
• Commercial Data Management: Partner with Finance and Commercial teams to deliver a single, trusted view of revenue, cost, and margin; produce multi-year trend analysis; surface global vs. regional performance; and identify growth opportunities unlocked by data.

Typical Activities

• Prioritise the data roadmap in line with business goals and translate initiatives into deliverable sprints with clear acceptance criteria.
• Review data product health (SLAs, freshness, quality), resolve incidents, and run change boards for configuration data.
• Collaborate with Finance and Commercial teams on group and regional commercial data models.
• Build and review models, guide code reviews, and QA BI outputs in Power BI to ensure executive decision-making is data-informed.
• Present findings and recommendations to senior leadership, documenting methods for re-use to embed insights into strategic decisions.
• Coach team members, manage vendor and data-provider relationships, and ensure GDPR-compliant, privacy-safe data usage.

Experience & Skills Required

• Considerable experience across data strategy, engineering/BI, and advanced analytics (media, OOH, or adjacent AdTech/MarTech experience preferred).
• Proven leadership experience building small, high-impact teams and setting standards for data quality, lineage, and documentation.
• Strong technical expertise in SQL, Python (or similar), cloud data stacks (Azure/AWS), modern ELT tools (e.g., dbt), data warehouses/lakehouses (BigQuery / Databricks), and Power BI.
• Strong domain knowledge of commercial analytics (revenue/cost/margin), audience/POI data usage for planning and measurement, and data privacy/DPIA processes.
• Excellent communication skills, including concise, executive-level storytelling and rigorous documentation.
• A disciplined, outcome-focused mindset, with respect for governance and the craft of data management.